“The letters of poets are not necessarily any more interesting than the letters of bank managers, but Anne Sexton was an exceptional writer of letters.Although…she was often difficult and at times impossible to live with, she kept the best of herself for her relationships by mail…Even when she is describing her own suicide attempts, Sexton’s letters do not read like the letters of someone who wanted to die. They are very much like those of a woman who wished passionately to live and who wished to live passionately…Charming, inventive, immediate and alive…Should be read not just for clues to her suicide…But for their exuberance and affirmation, not for their death but for their life.”
MARGARET ATWOOD, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“An extraordinary document…Her art was always the art of self-exposure, and her selected letters continue the literature of soul-flashing…For this soul—alternately wretched and ecstatic, triumphant and suicidal—is one that we come reluctantly to admire. Against what odds of neurosis, what armies of despair, does she deeply deploy that part of herself that wishes to survive! Although we know that she succumbed eventually to the internal enemy, these letters show an heroic struggle.”
DONALD HALL, NATIONAL REVIEW

“A book of letters livelier than most poetry…Linda Sexton has done a remarkable job in selecting and editing the letters, splicing them together with narrative explanations. The result is a biography, largely in the subject’s own words, as she would have wished.”
HAYDEN CARRUTH, HARPER’S