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Transformations

Anne Sexton,

Barbara Swan (Illustrator)

Kurt Vonnegut (Foreword)

4.20 · Rating details · 5,432 ratings · 269 reviews

The fairy tale-based works of the tortured confessional poet, whose raw honesty and wit in the face of psychological pain have touched thousands of readers.

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Paperback, 128 pages

Published February 15th 2001 by Mariner Books (first published 1971)

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Lists with This Book

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The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot

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Apr 05, 2012 Kinga rated it really liked it

Poetry is like wine to me. I enjoy it occasionally but I don’t have enough knowledge or experience to write elaborate tasting notes.

Like wine, I enjoy poetry on a more intangible level, the only difference is that of course, I am not more likely to go to bed with you if we end up reading poetry for the whole evening.
Therefore, I won’t write a proper review of Anne Sexton’s Transformations. But even Kurt Vonnegut Jr didn’t write anything sensible in his foreword to this edition.
‘Transformations’ ...more

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Feb 26, 2017 Jr Bacdayan rated it liked it

A collection of the mundane deconstructed to resemble the Grimm more than the silly and retold in verses oddly anachronistic yet alluring. What Sexton transforms is more magical than the droll tales of our childhood.

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Mar 18, 2014 Teresa rated it really liked it

Recommended to Teresa by: Mikki

Sexton takes specific fairy tales, starts each with a modern-day prologue and then tells the tale in her own fashion while being faithful to the plot of the original. Some of the humorous allusions she uses are now dated, such as describing Rumpelstiltskin's body as not being Sanforized; but as a whole, each poem extends the universal truth of the Grimm tale, as with Cinderella's prince's "marriage [meat] market."

I've probably read a Sexton poem here or there, but this was my first extended read ...more

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Dec 11, 2008 Natalie rated it really liked it

Shelves: i-blame-the-patriarchy, poetry, female-pen

An essential part of my early-life feminist awakening. Observe Cinderella as viewed by Anne Sexton:

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogeni An essential part of my early-life feminist awakening. Observe Cinderella as viewed by Anne Sexton:

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.

Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story. ...more

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Apr 04, 2014 averybird rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry, myth-folklore

“He turns the key.
Presto!
It opens this book of odd tales.
Which transform The Brothers Grimm.
Transform?
As if an enlarged paper clip
Could be a piece of sculpture.
(And it could.)”
-from The Gold Key

I am reading Transformations as part of The Complete Poems, but feel it should be discussed separately as it differs from this poet's usual style of confessional poetry. Although that is not quite true, as each of these fairy tale retellings does have a few stanzas of introduction that are modern reflect ...more

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Jan 28, 2010 Mikki rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry

Anne Sexton puts her spin on seventeen of the classic Grimm Fairy Tales -- simultaneously funny, twisted and dark. Each of her stories opens with a poem that introduces the tale with a comparison to modern culture.

For example, for Cinderella she writes:

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That s ...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

Jan 29, 2017 Katy rated it really liked it

Shelves: forest_2017

Some of the references can be dated for younger readers, the language is beautiful and at times disturbing. I can feel some of her suicidal tendencies in her poetry. A troubled soul with some wonderful insights into people.

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Jul 18, 2017 Clara Biesel rated it it was amazing

Fairy tale poetry which is scary, sexy, funny, and astonishing.

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Dec 28, 2016 mwpm rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry

The Gold Key

The speaker in this case
is a middle-aged witch, me -
tangled on my two great arms,
my face in a book
and my mouth wide,
ready to tell you a story or two.
I have come to remind you,
all of you:
Alice, Samuel, Kurt, Eleanor,
Jane, Brian, Maryel,
all of you draw near.
Alice,
at fifty-six do you remember?
Do you remember when you were read to as a child?
Samuel,
at twenty-two have you forgotten?
Forgotten the ten P.M. dreams
where the wicked king
went up in smoke?
Are you comatose?
Are you undersea?

Attent ...more

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Mar 17, 2018 Tjaša rated it really liked it

The illustrations are beautiful in this edition and I loved Rapunzel, The Frog Prince and Briar Rose.

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Feb 08, 2012 Karsten rated it really liked it

The book is 16 of the Grimm brothers folktales, retold, and an intro poem declaring that we are all a boy who, "upon finding a nickel / he would look for a wallet. This boy! Upon finding a string / he would look for a harp." And, the poem goes on, he/we have found a gold key that will open this book, where Grimm's tales are transformed.

And upon finding the tales, we look for a...?

Sexton recognizes what is ridiculous in these old tales and drily teases it a little in every poem. The dwarves who The book is 16 of the Grimm brothers folktales, retold, and an intro poem declaring that we are all a boy who, "upon finding a nickel / he would look for a wallet. This boy! Upon finding a string / he would look for a harp." And, the poem goes on, he/we have found a gold key that will open this book, where Grimm's tales are transformed.

And upon finding the tales, we look for a...?

Sexton recognizes what is ridiculous in these old tales and drily teases it a little in every poem. The dwarves who find Snow White: "those little hot dogs." Red Riding Hood's basket of wine and cake for her ill grandmother: "Wine and cake? / Where's the aspirin? The penicillin? / Where's the fruit juice? / Peter Rabbit got camomile tea. / But wine and cake it was." The prince searching for Cinderella (who "walked around looking like Al Jolson"): "He began to feel like a shoe salesman."

All of this good-humored 20th-century detail is the magician's feint, though, so that we're smiling and looking away when the poems stab us in the heart and lance out a hot gush of corrupt wishfulness.

Cinderella and her prince live happily ever after "they say," like "two dolls in a museum case...their darling smiles pasted on for eternity...That story." They say? That story? We'll never believe again.

Red Riding Hood at the end munches cake, slurps wine, and "remember[s] nothing naked and brutal from that little death." Those being among the last words of the poem, though, we'll be remembering the naked brutality.

And Snow White? The one who was betrayed by a stepmother who "had a mirror to which she referred" while "pride pumped in her like poison"? The poem ends with Snow White's wedding, of course, where she is already "rolling her china blue eyes open and shut / and sometimes referring to her mirror / as women do."

And upon finding folk tales, we look for a...what?

A moral, maybe? A happy ending? A sense of justice? A big number in a major key? Nope. What we get here is one wry, magnificent wound after another. ...more

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Jun 16, 2014 Melanti rated it liked it

Shelves: 2014, classics, fairy-tales-folklore-and-mythology, library, poetry

I think I've heard Anne Sexton mentioned in the same breath as Angela Carter so often that I was expecting something more along the lines of Carter's twisted retellings that have Little Red Riding Hood seducing the wolf, or Beauty turning into a lion in order to stay with the Beast.

But instead, what Sexton delivers is mostly straight-forward retellings that are surprisingly "by the book" other than a bit of change to modernize the settings. There were a few - especially towards the end of the v ...more

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Oct 16, 2013 Elizabeth rated it it was amazing

Incredible!

You haven't read THESE fairy tales unless you've read 'Transformations'

I FIRST read this for a graduate school seminar: Confessional Women Poets. I've returned to it countless times and still have my copy that I purchased in 1982. So many notes and highlighted parts to taste and savor again and again. It's fascinating to be reading these stories now at age fifty one and seeing how I felt and what I thought when I was nineteen. Takes me back to countless life experiences - the fabulo ...more

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Feb 06, 2013 Sylvain rated it liked it

I like the sense of humour of people who commit suicide:
"As for Hansel and Gretel,
they escaped and went home to their father.
Their mother,
you'll be glad to hear, was dead."

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May 15, 2015 Giedre rated it really liked it

4.5/5

Anne Sexton's dark, twisted and fun poetic retellings of Grimm fairytales. While reading these poems I was very much reminded of Angela Carter. I'm not trying to compare Sexton and Carter, but there you go. Highlights: "Hansel and Gretel", "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)", "Rapunzel", "Cinderella", "Red Riding Hood", "Godfather Death", "The Little Peasant".

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May 12, 2014 Belinda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry

Just stunning. Intro by Kurt Vonnegut-charming--weird--first poetry inspired by the fairy tale--then poetic re-telling of the fairy tale. sharp, funny, melancholy, a little shocking--a complete experience. I am so ready to start this from page one and do it again. I can't wait to read even more.

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Dec 06, 2017 Jack Wolf rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry

Very sad in its entirety, Sexton was and is a very emotional poet, unfortunately her knack for writing good poetry was fuelled by sadness of her life. She is in every essence similar to Sylvia Plath, but also like Plath she killed herself. It is within the lines of their poetry where the reader gets the idea of how much we should actually strive to live life to its fullest otherwise we may stare into the face of death before our time is really over.

There has been an odious suggestion about Sylvi Very sad in its entirety, Sexton was and is a very emotional poet, unfortunately her knack for writing good poetry was fuelled by sadness of her life. She is in every essence similar to Sylvia Plath, but also like Plath she killed herself. It is within the lines of their poetry where the reader gets the idea of how much we should actually strive to live life to its fullest otherwise we may stare into the face of death before our time is really over.

There has been an odious suggestion about Sylvia Plath’s and Anne Sexton’s poetry that has made a lot of people avert their gaze from even reading them. Plath and Sexton are both famous for being fatalistic, sadly many people refuse to read their work because on occasion their suicides have preceded their reputations as poets, thus deeming their work to be unfit to view due to its depressing nature. Both poet’s write “confessional poetry” which focuses on personal hardships and the lows of life, yet this doesn’t mean that we should turn a blind eye to their work. Plath was the wife of famous poet Ted Hughes, whose affair drove Plath to kill herself at the young age of 30, Sexton killed herself at the age of 45 by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Both of them battled with depression throughout their lives and through their poetry we can see the existentialism at its peak. I do believe however that both of them found a certain beauty in death because death to them acted as a form of deliverance from the burdens of life. Plath in her poem “Ariel” says that we “have no idea how free[ing]” death can be and Sexton says in her poem “Wanting to Die” that “suicides have a special language”, taking into these into account it furthers the idea that to them death was a very intimate experience. I personally do not agree with their outlook on life, but it is harrowing to see the extent of which someone can be crestfallen and unresponsive to the fleeting nature of life.

Sexton’s collection of poetry “Live or Die” saw her win the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1967, it’s as if Sexton wants us to pick one, either to live or die in this world and she couldn’t deal with the former anymore so she chose the latter. I don’t think that we should read their work because it’s sad or depressing, but because instead it is through seeing their fatalism that we can get an epiphany and will perhaps mend old fences or try new things, anything really that reminds us that we need to enjoy our short existence on this planet.

...more

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May 01, 2018 Liam rated it really liked it

Shelves: of-poems

The affectless narration of fairy tales censors the brutality that reinforces the morals they convey to condition children listeners. But what if fairy tales were retold to adults? Anne Sexton here makes a dark but not too dark rendering of fairy tales that does justice to their brutality. Each story begins with a few stanzas of abstract emotional context which I think I liked these more than the stories themselves, for they powerfully put the story in a mature emotional space.

Take Rapunzel, whi ...more

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Mar 14, 2018 Rachel Skye rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2018-challenge, grad-school, poetry, fairytales-and-folklore

3.5 ----- UGHHHH

Another really wonderful collection that I was so excited to dive in. I have to say I set this collection pretty high up on my expectation bar, and I feel like it fell a little short *sorry don't haaaaate*

I thought it was really wonderful - as fairy tales are my jam and I have put a lot of time and energy and effort into them - and I really liked how she stayed pretty true to the tails but at time I felt it was so closely related I didn't feel like it was as inventive as I was ex ...more

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Mar 28, 2018 Michael A. rated it really liked it

Re-tellings of famous fairy tales - I can't say for sure but I think at least some are disguised as confessional. The poems are often sarcastic and her wit is acerbic, and sometimes it can get quite dark. I liked the retelling of Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty the most. There are references in here that make me think it is autobiographical in some way (a reference to Thorazine for instance).

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Dec 19, 2018 -Vincie-W- rated it liked it

Shelves: 2018

Now the runaways would run no more and ever
again would their hair be tangled into diamonds,
never again their shoes worn down to a laugh,
never the bed falling down into purgatory
to let them climb in after
with their Lucifer kicking.
-THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES

Personally didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed other fairytale-based poetry collections, but the language is beautiful and the anachronistic messages are haunting and insightful.

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Jun 09, 2018 Paige Pagnotta rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry, 2018

"And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.
The heart, poor fellow,
pounding on his little tin drum
with a faint death beat."

-Red Riding Hood

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Feb 17, 2018 Marie rated it liked it

"And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery."

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Jun 05, 2017 Susie rated it it was amazing

I feel that I could re-read this one many more times and find something new to admire or puzzle over each time around. A delicious book!

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Nov 11, 2018 Andrew rated it liked it

Love her poetry, but not a great fan of this one. On this first reading, these re-told fairy tales (of sorts) just didn't do it for me.

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Jul 07, 2017 Malak Alrashed rated it liked it

I got to know to Anne Sexton as a poet that's influenced by Slyvia Plath, whom I worship. Also, since suicide is a major interest of me, Sexton's poetry was something I had to have on my shelves.

I bought Transformation without knowing that it's a collection of Fairy Tales-Based poems. Fairy tales like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and other Brother Grimm's stories. The poems of Anne are magical and innocent and somehow creepy. I love it when a story is told as a poem, it's something I personally d ...more

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Dec 30, 2017 Melissa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry, exceptional-poetry

The most amazing, beautifully written, heart-touching, book of poetry I have ever read. Just spectacular.

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Apr 30, 2017 Miri rated it really liked it

Shelves: female-authors, folk-and-fairy-tales, poetry

My god, that was grim. Wouldn't have thought the fairy tales could get even more disturbing than their original versions, but they have.

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Sep 28, 2017 Kent Winward rated it really liked it

Poetic versions of the violent fairy tales, prefaced and bracketed by the violence of real life.

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Sep 22, 2018 Nancy rated it it was amazing

How have I spent so much time not reading Anne Sexton's poems? These are playful and smart and I gobbled them up like that. They make adult the stuff of childhood (and vice versa?). It didn't matter that I did not know so well some of the tales she riffs on; their weird truths emerge.

Read mostly at my picnic table in Zion National Park.

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About Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton once told a journalist that her fans thought she got better, but actually, she just became a poet. These words are characteristic of a talented poet that received therapy for years, but committed suicide in spite of this. The poetry fed her art, but it also imprisoned her in a way.

Her parents didn’t expect much of her academically, and after completing her schooling at Rogers Hall, sh Anne Sexton once told a journalist that her fans thought she got better, but actually, she just became a poet. These words are characteristic of a talented poet that received therapy for years, but committed suicide in spite of this. The poetry fed her art, but it also imprisoned her in a way.

Her parents didn’t expect much of her academically, and after completing her schooling at Rogers Hall, she went to a finishing school in Boston. Anne met her husband, Kayo (Alfred Muller Sexton II), in 1948 by correspondence. Her mother advised her to elope after she thought she might be pregnant. Anne and Kayo got married in 1948 in North Carolina. After the honeymoon Kayo started working at his father-in-law’s wool business.

In 1953 Anne gave birth to her first-born, Linda Gray. Two years later Linda’s sister, Joyce Ladd, was born. But Anne couldn’t cope with the pressure of two small children over and above Kayo’s frequent absence (due to work). Shortly after Joy was born, Anne was admitted to Westwood Lodge where she was treated by the psychiatrist Dr. Martha Brunner-Orne (and six months later, her son, Dr. Martin Orne, took over). The original diagnosis was for post-natal depression, but the psychologists later decided that Anne suffered from depression of biological nature.

While she was receiving psychiatric treatment, Anne started writing poetry. It all started after another suicide attempt, when Orne came to her and told her that she still has a purpose in life. At that stage she was convinced that she could only become a prostitute. Orne showed her another talent that she had, and her first poetry appeared in print in the January of 1957. She wrote a huge amount of poetry that was published in a dozen poetry books. In 1967 she became the proud recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966).

In March 1972 Anne and Kayo got divorced. After this a desperate kind of loneliness took over her life. Her addiction to pills and alcohol worsened. Without Kayo the house was very quiet, the children were at college and most of Anne’s friends were avoiding her because they could no longer sympathize with her growing problems. Her poetry started playing such a major role in her life that conflicts were written out, rather than being faced. Anne didn’t mention a word to Kayo about her intention to get divorced. He knew that she desperately needed him, but her poems, and her real feelings toward him, put it differently. Kayo talks about it in an interview as follows: “... I honestly don’t know, never have known, what her real, driving motive was in the divorce. Which is another reason why it absolutely drove me into the floor like a nail when she did it.”

On 4 October 1974 she put on her mother’s old fur coat before, glass of vodka in hand, she climbed into her car, turned the key and died of monodioxide inhalation. She once told Orne that “I feel like my mother whenever I put it [the fur coat] on”. Her oldest daughter, Linda, was appointed as literary executor and we have her to thank for the three poetry books that appeared posthumously.
...more