End of Revels, by Natalie Marino

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

End of Revels is a collection of short poems spoken in the voice of Sylvia Plath at the time of her death. These poems are written in a new form to reflect their mystifying content and to make the argument that art necessarily involves creating something new: each poem is a half-sonnet and together the poems in this collection make up a modified heroic crown of half-sonnets.

In exploring the essence of art, this collection is also an attempt at addressing the ineffable. As a young mother of two small children who chose suicide, Sylvia Plath’s brief life and terrifying end have been obsessed over and fetishized by a society that often lets celebrity overshadow creativity. These poems aim to reveal the eternal value of creative work despite its author leaving the world behind.

Natalie Marino is a poet and practicing physician. Her work appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, wildness and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and the micro-chapbook Attachment Theory (Ghost City Press, 2021). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.