Sexton is a bit of an obsession of mine--I've been reading her poetry since I was a teenager, and *almost* wrote my dissertation on her! She's often compared to Sylvia Plath (who was her friend), but her poetry is very different. Where Plath is something of an intellectual poet and a meticulous craftsman, Sexton is more dramatic and playful; she doesn't have the same control of language as Plath, but she is a little more accessible. Plath was an introvert, but Sexton loved to perform for an audi More...

Is there a match in the world to For my lover returning to his wife? I don't think so....
and then To my Little girl, My Stringbean
The motherly advice that "Dear Linda, Women are born twice"
Her words are perfect in so many ways.

There are poems that go too far for my to enjoy them - I like some darkness in life, but I've been through my melodramatic stage already...so I don't need it quite as much....

that aside - read Transformations in its entirety - the reveal it gives to fairytales is a fabulou More...

I'm in this workshop and I have this poem and Kathleen Fraser says that if I don't take every pronoun out of my poem I run the risk of seeming confessional which is "at the worst, Anne Sexton, and at the best, Sylvia Plath." I felt stomped on. Not because she was right about my poem, but because I became aware that everyone could see me doing it, reading the complete Sexton, cover to cover one spring in college. I can see me beside the pool reading it and I'm thinking fuck you Kathleen, because More...

Anne Sexton was a poly-sensory, multimedia experience. Readings, film clips, photographs, recordings, interviews, outfits, rock groups, biographies and celebrity exposure are an inevitable part of the poems’ surround, and her work on the page is, for this reader, the least interesting part of her achievement. In a Coda to the bio, Middlebrook connects Sexton not so much with the poets of her generation as with later performing artists like Laurie Anderson, Annie Lennox, Patti Smith and Madonna, More...

Really, I'd give this book 2.5 stars, not 2. But anyway. I find myself pretty much agreeing with the reviews that I'd read of Sexton's body of work--unlike many poets, she starts off strong and then considerably weakens; she doesn't follow the usual bell curve trajectory. A friend of mine described Sexton as "Sylvia Plath lite" and I think I'd have to agree. There are many poems of Sexton's that I liked, often because of a similarity to Plath (in subject matter, voice, humor), but I found myself More...

Before Evanescence and Linkin Park ever became a cultural phenomena, Anne Sexton wrote poetry that captures the feelings of anguish, alienation, and a longing for human connectivity. Together we have haunted the black air, rearranged the disaligned, and ridden in the driver's cart. I have been her kind.

I take the book everywhere and it is not dog-eared because I take care of it. I am especially fond of her love poems. "Just an ordinary hand, longing for something to touch that touches back." You More...

I don't know how it is that I never spent much time reading Anne Sexton until now, but I absolutely love her work. Lively, bold, humorous, full of surprise, as well as searching for redemption, connection, meaning, God? but not forgiveness. I love this woman.

Here's a poem I'm digging:

Jesus Suckles by Anne Sexton, from Book of Folly, 1972

Mary, your great
white apples make me glad.
I feel your heart work its
machine and I doze like a fly.
I cough like a bird on its worm.
I’m a jelly-baby and you’re my More...

I originally gave this four stars because Anne Sexton is far from perfect and there are poems of hers (esp. Transformations) that I don't like that much but then again, when she's on, it's pretty much as close as I'm ever going to come to smoking crack. Really, I love how she can pile on the similes as if they were college students piling into a phone booth.

Could not write a better review for this collection than this one below from a fellow goodreadsian (hope she doesn't mind):

Dawn Pendergast rated it: (3 stars - review of isbn 0395329353)
"I'm in this workshop and I have this poem and Kathleen Fraser says that if I don't take every pronoun out of my poem I run the risk of seeming confessional which is "at the worst, Anne Sexton, and at the best, Sylvia Plath." I felt stomped on. Not because she was right about my poem, but because I became aware More...

My copy of this is on the verge of becoming dust. The spine is double duct-taped, there are drawings from 1994 Lakey inside the cover, there are torn polaroids, flyers for 90's San Francisco and New Orleans goth clubs and fetish parties and scraps of paper scribbled with my own speed scorched words to mark certain passages or entire poems that, at that time, were SO IMPORTANT, meant everything, my salvation during the turbulent typhoid mary bipolar self-medicated & self-destructive years of More...

i'm spotty in my poetry reading/knowledge but with Sexton's words i really feel a sense of her flesh and blood. i sometimes fear just how much of her work i find relatable.

Anne Sexton is one of my favorite poets. Confessional poets have always appealed to me with their raw honesty and intensity.

She is strong in how her hand hangs above my head as I read these poems. At any moment she could strike, and often does; but mostly I love that she is not afraid to caress me with that same hand. This work is most beautiful; Anne has a way with odd images. There is a lot to learn on the art of poetics from this gorgeous deity. Her growth as a poet is of particular interest, and is made easy to trace by such a collection. The book is for those who like Rimbaud and the moderns: both Anne and Rimba More...

I don't think I could write a review that could explain my love appropriately. As I was reading I marked my favorite poems from each section.

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960):
You, Doctor Martin
Some Foreign Letters
Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree

All My Pretty Ones (1962):
The Starry Night
I Remember
Love Song for K. Owyne

Live or Die (1966):
Imitations of Drowning
Love Song

Love Poems (1969):
The Breast
For My Lover, Returning to His Wife
Just Once

Transformations (1971):
Iron Hans
O More...

The extent to which Anne Sexton connected art and self-destruction may have been symptomatic of her illness and later her addiction to pills and alcohol. For all her effort to purge her innermost demons, her anger remained turned inward albeit she fought against it with spectacular might. Her work dares to defy convention and carries the capacity to linger in the reader’s memory with a complex unease. It makes for difficult, sometimes uncomfortable reading but it also demands to be read.My revie More...

I came into Sexton's poetry expecting darkness, emotion and a good dose of crazy. While I was not disappointed, I also found whimsy and a keen observational eye. Sexton noticed the little details of mundane life, and wrote about these with a child-like appreciation. I have only begun to browse this collection, picking it up at odd moments during the night, but I already love it.

One of my favourite examples of Sexton's whimsy is this verse from Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island More...

I have not read much poetry in the 15 years I have been alive. I have read the poems that are required, expected, to be read in school, but that is pretty much where it ends.
There are certain poets whose names I have seen and automatically wanted to read. Anne Sexton is one of them. Maybe it was the ‘sex’ in her last name that grabbed my attention. I am a teenage boy and all.
Maybe it's the picture of her on the cover of her Collected Poems, though I bought her Selected Poems first. I gave that a More...

Rather than write a review, I will put in quotes:

COURAGE
It is in the small things we see it.
the child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the widewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you a crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover you More...

8/23/11: OK, I officially give up. This is apparently not the time in my life to be reading poetry, especially not a complete collection. I'll mark my page and maybe finish it after law school. (Though it'll still remain the base for my sound machine. Sorry, Anne.)

6/4/11: Oh jeezus, it's been almost a year since I started this and I've gotten about halfway. I guess I could blame it on law school, but I've not even cracked this one in MONTHS, and I don't feel particularly compelled to... I should More...

I first got in touch with the poetry of Anne Sexton by a Dutch television program called Dode Dichters Almanak: short clips of deceased poets performing one or two of their poems. Her work immediately caught my attention, partly because she was an intriguing woman, with dark hair and dark eyes and a daring yet vulnerable performance, but mostly because of the physicality of it (I mostly remember horse's hoofs, milk and blood featuring in the poem that so impressed me, called Pain For A Daughter) More...

What can I say about Anne Sexton? She's incomparable--perhaps wholly unique in the history of women's poetry. I'd like to review each of her books separately at some point, which is why I've kept this on my shelf for so long, even though I finished rereading the entire brick in March. As so many comment, the poetry is sometimes hit or miss--particularly in her last two or three collections. But far more often (which critics conveniently forget), she's absolutely on, absolutely raw, absolutely a More...

Sexton is better than Plath. But that's not saying much. Still, I have a lingering affection/admiration for the way she uses words at times. And poems like "Rowing" & "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" are still stuck in my head from years ago ("the sea blinks and rolls like a worried eyeball;" "there below are the trees, as awkward as camels..."). So I can't in good conscience heap scorn on Sexton. Even if I don't think much of the exhibitionistic Confessional guilt complex.

(2.5 stars)

Anne Sexton is definitely an important poet, in terms of adding a new, female voice to the world of poetry (exhibit A: 'In Celebration of My Uterus'). And I'm sure that at the time, her work was indeed very controversial and it must not have been easy to write what she wrote.

That said, reading her "Complete Poems" is just overkill. She's a woman first, a poet second. Almost all her poems are about being female. After a while, each poem sounds the same as the last one. There just isn't More...

Absolutely quintessential book or any poetry lover. This lady is a genius with words. It is unfortunate that her despair was pivotal to all her creative ventures. I empathise with her on so many levels. Stand out poems include...
You, Doctor Martin.
Her kind.
The Expatriates.
The division of parts.
The Operation.
The Abortion.
Snow White and the seven dwarves.
Cinderella.
Red riding hood.
Hansel and Gretel.
Small wire.
45 Mercy St.
The falling dolls.

Some of my favorite poems from this collection are: Her Kind, Said the Poet to the Analyst, The Farmer's Wife, Hutch, A Story for Rose on the Midnight Flight to Boston, For John Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further, The Starry Night, Doors Doors Doors, Imitations of Drowning, Consorting With Angels, Man and Wife, A Little Uncomplicated Hymn, The Addict, Moon Song Woman Song, 18 Days Without You, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Rats Live on No Evil Star, The Furies, The Poet of Ignorance, Red R More...

oh, anne sexton. i love this collection. you can see her development as a poet, and also chart her mood-progression . . . this (obviously) contains all of my favorites. i only wish it had some critical essays, or included more of the rough edits of her work.

i mean, i miss the days of the type-writers, because then you could see how a poem progressed. however, this includes the "transformations" series, as well as some posthumous works.

Several Years Ago I received this book as a gift but it was some time before I sat down with it as I wasn't familiar with Anne Sexton at the time. Then one April, during poetry month, I decided to read poetry for 30 to 40 minutes before going to bed. This was one of the books I pulled out of the shelf to read. I loved it. I re-cycle my fiction books but my poetry books live in my bedroom shelf to be read and re-read.

I have loved Anne Sexton ever since I discovered her in high school. Her poems are quite modern and I find myself relating to several of them. Many of them are quite dark - it's a remarkable insight into her own troubled life. It's a shame she seems to be under-appreciated (well, at least amongst my friends), though I think that's what made discovering her so much better.

This collection is my constant. It never fails to awe me. My favorite Sexton poems have changed over the years - but she has never diminished in my view. "Big Boots of Pain" & "The Risk" are currently 2 of my favorite poems. Anyone who reads through this collection will recognize Sexton as far exceeding the confines of 'college chick poet' that is too often stamped on her.

I'm very slowly making my way through this, because it's very good, but DAMN is she depressing! I guess that makes sense, with the suicide and all, but... yow.

...

So here's what I've decided. Not really a big fan of depressing poetry. After several months of avoiding reading this it occurred to me that I don't really want to read it. Granted, maybe starting on her complete works was inadvisable, but hey. Lesson learned.

Although one of the books in here was really cool. It's called Transformation More...