Transformations by Anne Sexton. Preface by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1971 Houghton Mifflin, first printing, 112 pages. Pulitzer Prize-winner Sexton was a poet who's most well-known poems dealt with mental illness, death, and relationships with her family. She died by suicide at the age of 45. Transformations retells fairy tales. According to a New York Times review: "If her poetry has betrayed any weakness in the past, it has been her tendency to allow its content to do the work—a tendency to record raw disasters without curing them with her art....[B]y using the artificial as the raw material of “Transformations” and working her way backwards to the immediacy of her personal vision, she draws her readers in more willingly, and thereby makes them more vulnerable to her sudden plunges into personal night mare." Condition: Jacket Vg, small tear on back, some wear, book VG, old Strand price sticker on front pastedown "Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out"
