Author Statement: “I love Sylvia Plath's work. I think what's often under-appreciated about her is that she's one of the great poetry technicians of the 20th Century - she has an incredible eye that not only observes and describes the world but recasts it through the filter of her own perspectives and experiences. If the result of this is bleak, then the sharing of that bleakness is also an act of supreme artistic generosity. I think she's what happens when you cross Romanticism with Absurdism - in her nature poetry, she seems to be constantly in search of the sublime but her poems often seem to be about what the failure to find what it might mean. In my own poem, I wanted to observe the sparrow, but through the slightly alienating similes and the flatness of the final line, I have attempted to reflect what I think is a core aspect of her approach.”