The Death Notebooks Summary

The Death Notebooks, published the year of Sexton's suicide, is a confrontation with death, divinity, and the very nature of life. The poems in this book are among the author's most protracted, conceptual, and experimental. As the title suggests, the poems tend toward the morbid and macabre, although Sexton finds a variety of ways to make these qualities compelling and readable.

"Gods" finds the author working still in poetic autobiography, and she tells of her many journeys in search of the gods, only to find them shut up in the bathroom of her own home, in which she locks them. "Making a Living" retells the biblical story of Jonah in the mouth of the whale, only in Sexton's version, Jonah becomes famous for his experience by relating his story to the news media after he leaves the whale. The...