1. Her Kind (To Bedlam and Part Way Back) 2. The Ambition Bird (The Book of Folly) 3. The Truth the Dead Know (All My Pretty Ones) 4. Ringing the Bells (To Bedlam and Part Way Back) 5. Some Foreign Letters (To Bedlam and Part Way Back) 6. The Little Peasant (Transformations) 7. Making a Living (The Death Notebooks) 8. Gods (The Death Notebooks) 9. The Fury of Abandonment (The Death Notebooks) 10. The Fury of Overshoes (The Death Notebooks) 11. The Fury of Cocks (The Death Notebooks) 12. The Fury of Sunsets (The Death Notebooks) 13. The Fury of Sunrises (The Death Notebooks) 14. Jesus Cooks (The Book of Folly) 15. Jesus Walking (The Death Notebooks) 16. Rowing (The Awful Rowing Toward God) 17. The Play (The Awful Rowing Toward God) 18. Clothes (The Death Notebooks) 19. The Rowing Endeth (The Awful Rowing Toward God) 20. Us (Love Poems) 21. The Touch (Love Poems)

2:29 What a beauty...The first color pic of Anne I have laid eyes on in the many years since I read her work for the first time...The Truth The Dead Know I read in the summer of 2011. I remember the day so vividly. July, a late afternoon I read it several times after hearing her reading, and took a printed poem 45 Mercy Street to bed and was reading it before a nap, when a strong New England thunderstorm passed in and right over the house. It was something of a sign;I knew I just got into something really really good :)

She sounds very eerie and touched by the heights of her own creation. I feel for her. Putting your soul into your work is not always easy

She really brings the poetry to life. This really is a treasure of a recording!

What a gift to hear Anne a few days before she left! She is pure brilliance! Unparalleled! LOVE HER!

Thank you, Sorina!💝 She sounded like she was in good spirits at this reading. I did not realize this was so close to her death. But I know that with depression, change can come very quickly! I am sorry that she felt so alone and sad. She truly was brilliant!

Thank you, Sorina! I heard this recording at Goucher (my alma mater, 1992 ). It's wonderful to have access to this here. I have mixed feelings about this recording. It's such a powerful reading, but/and I hear so much pain and even, treagically, defeat in her voice-- maybe that's b/c we know what happened to her a few days later. It's tempting to believe that Confessional poetry is simply unmediated expression of powerful feelings, almost without art, but we know that's not the case. I hear her artistry, but I also hear in the cracks her throbbing pain.

She sounds like an amazing woman what a terrible tragedy to die so senselessly with a power in her voice so soon. What resonance of voice and spirit I find her enthralling and fierce as a woman should be... what power and imagery as a poet.

All [this] cruelty, all [this] violence that surrounds us is not entertainment for those who consider sensitivity a noble feeling. She's had enough, you can tell by her voice. Something's wrong, something's not quite right. Those who treat us most terribly and exploit us and everything bad . . . no matter what . . . [. . .] are the politicians who cheapen us with their dirty and exploitative lies. In retrospect, the applause is eery and unbearable.

She reads with so much emotion, so much artistry...

Quite the performer she was, and esp. considering the circumstances.

What a gift this is. Thank you.

3 days before her death. One of the greatest ever

I prefer to read her poems...make up my own level of drama....than to hear Sexton deliver.

1:18:00 The Touch (Love Poems) For months my hand have been sealed off in a tin box. Nothing was there but the subway railings. Perhaps it is bruised, I thought, and that is why they have locked it up.but when i looked in it lay there quietly. You could tell time by this, I thought, like a clock, by its five knuckles and the thin underground veins. It lay there like an unconscious woman fed by tubes she knew not of. The hand had collapse, a small wood pigeon that had gone into seclusion. I turned it over and the palm was old, its lines traced like fine needlepoint and stitched up into fingers. It was fat and soft and blind in places. Nothing but vulnerable. And all this is metaphor. An ordinary hand -- just lonely for something to touch that touches back. The dog won't do it. Her tail wags in the swamp for a frog. I'm no better than a case of dog food. She owns her own hunger. My sisters won't do it. They live in school except for buttons and tears running down like lemonade. My father won't do it. He comes with a house and even at night he lives in a machine made by my mother and well oiled by his job, his job. The trouble is that I'd let my gestures freeze. The trouble was not in the kitchen or the tulips but only in my head, my head. Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours. They dance in the attic and in Vienna. My hand is alive all over America. Not even death will stop it, death shedding her blood. Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom and the kingdom come.

Those eyes.

Love. Legendary

💛❤️

OMG

What a slasher!

there is nothing like this. [Hint: if you haven't read the Awful Rowing, hold off listening to the poem Rowing Endeth (see the contents someone posted below, #19) till you do. It is kind of a Spoiler to get the book ends like this.]

I love her !!!!!!!

Her anniversary today ❤

Anne Sexton

44:14 The fury of abandonment. Someone lives in a cave eating his toes, I know that much. Someone little lives under a bush pressing an empty Coca-Cola can against his starving bloated stomach, I know that much. A monkey had his hands cut off for a medical experiment and his claws wept. I know that much. I know that it is all a matter of hands. Out of the mournful sweetness of touching comes love like breakfast. Out of the many houses come the hands, like ants before the abandonment of the city, out of the bars and shops, a thin file of ants. I've been abandoned out here under the dry stars with no shoes, no belt and I've called Rescue Inc. - that old-fashioned hot line - no voice. Left to my own lips, touch them, my own demise, touch them, the progression of my parts, touch them, my own nostrils, shoulders, breasts, navel, stomach, mound,kneebone, ankle, touch them. It makes me laugh to see a woman in this condition. It makes me laugh for America and New York city when your hands are cut off and no one answers the phone.

De unde ai scos minunatia asta?😍

5.35m

5:37.120