Originally published in 1960 and now available in a trade paperback edition for the first time, Sylvia Plath's initial book of poems burst into the world with the spectacular force and compression of a geyser. Plath writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.