Live or Die
Sexton's Pulitzer-winning collection, arranged in order of composition as a journal of suicidal crisis, survival, and ambivalent recovery. Where Plath burns with cold anger, Sexton is warmer and more direct; her confessional mode is more nakedly therapeutic. "Wanting to Die" is one of the most honest poems ever written about depression's seduction. Her witchcraft and fairy tale sequences (in Transformations) came later; Live or Die is the rawest.
Readers who know Sexton's full run tend to rank this one below her first two books, To Bedlam and Part Way Back and All My Pretty Ones; one writes plainly that “her first two collections were of a better sort.” Critics writing at the time objected to her move away from the tighter, formally controlled verse of those earlier books toward looser, confessional free verse, and “most critics gave harsh reviews for the change of form.” Because the poems run in strict chronological order, darkness dominates almost the entire book, and the late turn toward Live can land as abrupt rather than gradually earned. Genuine reader disappointment is hard to find here; today's ratings skew heavily positive, so most of the pushback traces back to critics from Sexton's own era rather than current readers.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
