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Sexton wrote confessional poetry that turned her own psychiatric hospitalizations, suicide attempts, marriage, and motherhood directly into verse, at a time when doing so was considered a serious breach of decorum for a woman writer. She began writing at her therapist’s suggestion as a form of treatment and became one of the defining voices of the confessional movement alongside Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, before dying by suicide in 1974.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Confessional Poetry · Updated August 2026
PoetryOn my shelf
To Bedlam and Part Way Back
Sexton’s debut collection, written largely during and after a period of psychiatric hospitalization, addressing mental illness, institutionalization, and family with a directness that was unusual for poetry of the period.
The book that established confessional poetry as a serious form — Sexton takes material most poets of the era would have euphemized or avoided entirely and writes it in plain, exact language.
Poetry
All My Pretty Ones
Sexton’s second collection, written in the aftermath of both of her parents’ deaths within months of each other, examining grief, inheritance, and the complicated love of imperfect parents.
Considered a formal step forward from her debut — the grief poems here are some of her most technically controlled work, channeling raw material through careful, deliberate form.
Poetry
Live or Die
A collection tracing roughly three years of Sexton’s life in loosely chronological order, ending on a note of tenuous, hard-won affirmation that gives the book its title. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967.
The arc of the collection — moving through despair toward something like a decision to keep living — is what makes it distinct from her other books; it reads almost as a single sustained argument rather than a set of discrete poems.
Poetry
Transformations
A collection reimagining seventeen Grimm fairy tales in a wry, dark, contemporary voice, using the familiar stories as a vehicle for examining sexuality, power, and violence against women.
Her most formally playful book — the fairy-tale structure gives her a narrative scaffold that lets the confessional material work through metaphor and irony rather than direct address.
Poetry
The Awful Rowing Toward God
Published posthumously, written in the weeks before Sexton’s suicide, tracing a search for religious meaning and God as a final, urgent subject after decades of writing about despair and survival.
Impossible to separate from the fact of her death shortly after finishing it — the book reads as both a genuine spiritual search and, in retrospect, a kind of farewell.
