One of the greatest mad, sad literary love affairs of the twentieth century was that between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In her collection of poems, Hurdle adapts her own research on their lives to explore the love and loss in this relationship of poetic collaboration and rivalry, which lasts, in Hurdle's recreation, even after Plath's suicide in 1963 and Hughes' death in 1998. At points, the poet-narrator forms a literary ménage à trois with the two poets as she struggles obsessively to understand their own lives as individual artists and their love-torn relationship.

Crystal Hurdle was born in Zwiebrucken, Germany and grew up in Ottawa, Ontario and Victoria, British Columbia, where she obtained a BA and MA in English. Since 1985 she has been teaching Creative Writing and English Literature and Composition at Capilano College in North Vancouver. Her poetry has been widely published in Canadian journals, including Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review and The Capilano Review. As a featured speaker, she read a number of her Plath/:Hughes poems as the international Plath Symposium at the University of Indiana in the fall of 2002. With her husband she presently makes her home in North Vancouver, BC.

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