One of the greatest mad, sad literary love affairs of the 20th 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. In the final sections, the envious poet-narrator loses her privileged place as the lover of both Ted and Sylvia. Other voices, including those of family members, a late night talk show host, a holocaust survivor, and literary critics, address Plath, whose poetry has now entered the wider public domain. For the reader, there is the great joy of finding familiar images from both Plath and Hughes, but images that echo with a new resonance.