Poetry
Live or Die
Anne Sexton · 1966
Synopsis
Poems dated like a diary, from 1962 to 1966, arranged in the order in which they were written. A mother writes to her eleven-year-old daughter to tell her what she knows about the changing body. A woman returns to the psychiatric hospital, among the other patients. Other poems deal with menstruation at forty or the death of a poet friend. The title poses an alternative in two words, and the last poem of the volume, composed after all the others, settles it with the first of the two.
Context
The volume carries the date of each piece, which makes it a diary as much as a collection; the author says she arranged it in the order of writing, like the fever chart of a melancholy. It was her third book in six years. She gave very frequent readings, and from 1968 to 1971 she performed with a group of musicians, Anne Sexton and Her Kind. The collection has been translated in full into French since 2021, in the volume of her poetic works of the sixties.
Who it is for
A collection of medium length: the dates are part of the text and the volume is meant to be read from the first poem to the last. The subjects are hard and stated without detour. Translated by Sabine Huynh.
Prizes and reception
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1967; it is still today the author's most celebrated collection.
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