The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton (Mariner, $18). Sexton was the first poet I discovered on my own. I was 18 years old, and had recently made the decision to become a writer. I took Anne home and fell so hard and fast, line after line, stanza after stanza. Years after her suicide, I can hear her writing about herself, but also directly to that budding writer in me: “A woman like that is not a woman, quite. / I have been her kind.”
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