Maxine Kumin thinks of Anne Sexton as her "best friend"; they lunched together cheerfully the day before Sexton killed herself. They shared a sense of woman's bondage by both nature and society. Though they have written occasionally of social matters …, neither has written poems of social protest comparable to Adrienne Rich's. Both have concentrated on their individual lives as subject matter…. [At] her worst (a rarity in her last two books), Kumin is too New Yorker-sophisticated…. Kumin uses similes more than Sexton, though sometimes her metaphors (the potatoes' "ten tentative erections") shock in the best sense of the word…. Kumin, who is [hard] to pin down, is represented rather well by her reluctant wearing of dead Sexton's clothes in "How It Is." Most of Kumin's poems turn from inside to outside…. Although Kumin can write a poem entitled "Heaven as Anus," and close one of her best poems...