Today marks the 51st anniversary of Anne Sexton’s death! RIP!

(9 November 1928, Newton, MA – 4 October 1974, Weston, MA)

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"Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build."

–Anne Sexton, from “Wanting to Die”, written February 3, 1964; in: Live or Die (1966)

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Photo: Anne Sexton (c. 46 years old) photographed by Arthur Furst at her home in Weston, Massachusetts in summer 1974; featured in the book The Last Summer (2000)

HAPPY 96th BIRTHDAY Anne Sexton! RIP!

(9 November 1928, Newton, MA – 4 October 1974, Weston, MA)

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I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs two cramped girls breathing carelessly, each asleep in her tiny beauty. I did not know that my life, in the end, would run over my mother's like a truck and all that would remain from the year I was six was a small hole in my heart, a deaf spot, so that I might hear the unsaid more clearly.

–Anne Sexton, from “Those Times”, written June 1963 (in: Live or Die, 1966)

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Photo by Arthur Furst