SOURCE: "Anne Sexton: The Making of 'The Awful Rowing Toward God,'" in Rossetti to Sexton: Six Women Poets at Texas, edited by Dave Oliphant, University of Texas at Austin, 1992, pp. 223-35.

In the following essay, Middlebrook discusses Sexton's friendship with James Wright and the composition The Awful Rowing Toward God.

Between 10 and 30 January 1973, Anne Sexton wrote—"with two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital"—an entire volume of poems. Eventually titled The Awful Rowing Toward God, this proved to be the last book Sexton saw into print. A few hours after correcting the galleys on 4 October 1974, she committed suicide. Important in its own right as Anne Sexton's "last" book, this volume gains great interest from being viewed in the context of collections of worksheets, correspondence, and other items in the Sexton archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The...