The Serious World

The Serious World is a collection of epistolary poems written to Sylvia Plath about depression, therapy, friendship, family, and the struggling life of an artist. With humor, sensitivity, and deep reflection, Laura Read explores many themes including mental health, suicide, loss, feminism, motherhood, and aging, offering a fresh view of the world as seen through the feminist poet’s searching spyglass. 

Reaching back into history to talk with Plath and other historical figures who have suffered and wrote about their suffering, Read tries to make sense of what it’s like to be alive and suffering now. These deeply felt poems include language from Plath’s The Bell Jar and poems about Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir, along with other strange bedfellows from pop culture who make appearances, among them Kenny Rogers, Dr. Seuss, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love.

Praise for The Serious World

“Helen Vendler wrote that Sylvia Plath possessed ‘a genius for the transcription in words of those wild states of feeling which in the rest of us remain so inchoate that we quail under them, speechless.’ Laura Read’s The Serious World channels this unflinching Plathian voice—elliptical, narrative, and darkly funny. These are poems the reader instinctively trusts. ‘You have to keep going back to the rooms, / you have to say how you feel,’ Read writes, recognizing that to capture the explosive unfairness of life in a woman’s body, one must commit to relentless, continually evolving truth-telling. The Serious World casts these spinning plates of grief, loss, aging, and meaning-making in the air, inviting the reader to marvel at their absurdity, and daring us to laugh. These poems evoke Plath’s ‘wild states of feeling’ viscerally—dissatisfied with one reading, I dive back in to rediscover all the nuances of Read’s polyhedral mind.” —Jenny Molberg, author of The Court of No Record 

“In long, discursive, compulsively readable poems, the kind that make me feel as though I am re-reading one of the many beloved interlocutors of this beautiful book—Plath, Melville, de Beauvoir, Duras—Laura Read opens a door to a fully-drawn world. This book may be serious with tragedy, but it is also warm with the absurd comedy we lean on to survive, and in infinite conversation with the life of the mind. I will return to The Serious World when I am full of yearning, or sadness, or simply want a smart, irreverent chat with a few brilliant friends.” —Emily Van Duyne, author of Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation 

“Equally at home referencing Sylvia Plath or Courtney Love, and fluent in the languages of both Simone de Beauvoir and Madonna singing on stage in an ‘80s movie about wrestling, Laura Read can find the comic and the tragic in nearly anything, often at the same time. These are finely-crafted, nuanced poems, unafraid to ask big questions about loss and love and being a person in the world. These poems don’t aim to comfort, but to reach for meaning in their discomfort. Read asks, ‘Am I always about to say something upsetting to mothers and therapists?’ Probably. And we readers are so lucky for that.” —Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route