To read the poetry of Anne Sexton is to drown in the moment between sleeping and waking. Although Sexton's poems range in tone from gritty to incandescent, her content is consistently sharp, insightful, and stinging. She's one of those rare talents who manages to write with a purpose AND a passion. The first time I read her work, the thought that sprang to mind was: "Wow. She's writing what everyone else is only thinking." Sexton has a great capacity to verbalize the unspeakable, and she does it in such a way that it scars you and heals you simultaneously. Take, for example, her "Transformations" series (the re-written fairy tales.) Here we have incest, beauty, fear, love, repression, magic...all tangled between translucent words with spines of steel. To say I am in awe of this book is to only scratch the surface.