The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton comprises the poet's ten volumes of verse, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Live or Die, as well as seven poems from her last years.
For Anne Sexton, writing served as both a means of expressing the inner turmoil she experienced for most of her life and as a therapeutic force through which she exorcised her demons. Some of the richest poetic descriptions of depression, anxiety, and desperate hope can be found within Sexton’s work. The Complete Poems, which includes the eight collections published during her life, two posthumously published books, and other poems collected after her death, brings together her remarkable body of work with all of its range of emotion.
With her first collection, the haunting To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Sexton stunned critics with her frank treatment of subjects like masturbation, incest, and abortion, blazing a trail for representations of the body, particularly the female body, in poetry. She documented four years of mental illness in her moving Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Live or Die, and reimagined classic fairy tales as macabre and sardonic poems in Transformations. The Awful Rowing Toward God, the last book finished in her lifetime, is an earnest and affecting meditation on the existence of God. As a whole, The Complete Poems reveals a brilliant yet tormented poet who bared her deepest urges, fears, and desires in order to create extraordinarily striking and enduring art.
"Women poets in particular owe a debt to Anne Sexton, who broke new ground, shattered taboos, and endured a barrage of attacks along the way because of the flamboyance of her subject matter...Sexton has earned her place in the canon."—from the Foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin
“Sexton drew her poems from a great depth in herself, and they continue to stir us. . . . Her voice remains a distinctive one in American poetry of the past half-century.” —J. D. McClatchy
“Anne Sexton is one of the writers by whom our age will be known and understood in times to come. . . . [Her poems] will be understood in time—not as ‘women’s poetry’ or ‘confessional poetry’—but as myths that expand the human consciousness.” —Erica Jong, The New York Times
“One of the most important American poets of her generation.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Times
“[Anne Sexton] domesticates my terror, examines and describes it, teaches it some tricks which will amuse me, then lets it gallop wild in my forest once more.” —Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
