Mercies

Do you know Anne Sexton? I worship her

Do you know Anne Sexton? I worship her

Anne Sexton domesticates my terror, examines it and describes it , teaches it some tricks which will amuse me, then lets it gallop wild in my forest once more ... God love her

In Sexton's New England ... adultery looms as the next horizon of sexual destiny, once marriage and childbirth have ripened a woman's body and mapped her pleasure centers ... No woman had published such poems in English for centuries

Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1928. Her first mental breakdown with post-partum depression occurred after the birth of her elder daughter in 1953; repeated hospitalizations followed throughout her life. Her therapist encouraged her to write, and in 1957 she joined poetry workshops in Boston which would bring her into the orbit of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Her books include To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Live or Die (1966), Love Poems (1969), The Death Notebooks (1974) and three posthumous volumes, including The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975). She committed suicide in October 1974 at the age of 45.