Award-winning poet Emily Berry joins us to consider the work and troubled life of Anne Sexton. We focus on her brilliant second collection All My Pretty Ones (1962). Sexton was a trailblazing American poet of the so-called 'confessional' school of the 1960s, one whose writing continues to provoke controversy and debate; her friends and contemporaries included Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. We hear from Sexton herself, in recordings of readings and interviews, and fronting own experimental jazz-rock ensemble, Anne Sexton and Her Kind, and also from her daughter Linda.

Please note: Anne Sexton was an unflinching chronicler of her own struggle with mental illness, and this episode contains extensive discussion of suicide and sexual abuse.

Books mentioned
Anne Sexton - All My Pretty Ones; Mercies: Selected Poems; No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose; Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters
Emily Berry - Dear Boy, Stranger Baby, Unexhausted Time; The Breakfast Bible; ‘The White Review: The Secret Country of Her Mind’

Other links
Emily Berry website - https://www.emilyberry.co.uk/
Sleep World app - https://sleepworlds.com/
The New School of Confessional Poetry - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/151109/an-introduction-to-confessional-poetry
Anne Sexton and Her Kind Sound Recordings, 1968-1971 - https://library.harvard.edu/collections/anne-sexton-and-her-kind-sound-recordings-1968-1971
Anne Sexton at home reading Wanting to Die - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM6nWRXCQD8