Second April

These poems burn with the fever of being twenty-three. Written when Edna St. Vincent Millay was barely out of college, Second April captures the exquisite torment of wanting, the overwhelming weight of feeling everything at once, the terrible knowledge that beauty does not stay. Here is love as annihilation, as transcendence, as the only thing that matters. Here is April arriving like a wound, like a demand. Millay writes with a recklessness that feels illegal: desires named plainly, heartbreak rendered without defense, nature as mirror for every ache. She writes as though each moment might be the last, and somehow makes that urgency beautiful instead of desperate. A century later, these poems still possess that wild, undefended quality. They are for anyone who has ever loved too much, too soon, or at all.