draws its title from the conclusion to Charlotte Brontë’s : “Reader, I married him.” Spanning the first years of a marriage, the speaker in both courts and eschews nuptial myths, as its speaker—tender and callous, skeptical and hopeful, daughter and lover—finds a role for herself in marriage, in history, in something beyond the self. While these poems burn with a Plathian fire, they also address and invite in a reader who is, as in , a confidant. Steeped in a world of husbands and fathers, patriarchal nations and power structures, traverses bowling alleys and hospital rooms, ancient Troy and public swimming pools, to envision domestic life as a metaphor for civic life, and vice versa.