After her death Anne Sexton's poetry continues to push against the boundaries of loss, to embody the daily nature of a despair that is as quiet as a lit fuse. Imminent explosion, the air tense before a storm—this is the energy of her last poems: a sensibility leaning over the edge of control, knowing that loss is final and inevitable. Sexton's poems have always come from the frontiers of the personal. In fact, her work scouted vast unknown regions of emotion for poetry and brought back word…. (p. 87)

45 Mercy Street is her ninth book. It is brought out posthumously, edited by her daughter and literary executor, Linda Gray Sexton. In her introduction Linda Sexton writes that the book was "complete" at the time of Sexton's suicide in 1974 but that the manuscript was still in the process of revision. "Each line appears exactly as she wrote it," Linda...