All My Pretty Ones

All My Pretty Ones is the second poem in this collection and Sexton took the title from a line in MacBeth, it's MacDuff's reaction after learning that MacBeth has killed his children.

What I found more haunting was the quote from Kafka at the beginning:
"the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation - a book should serve as the for the frozen sea within us.

Here are some poems and their lines that broke the frozen sea for me -

With Mercy for The Greedy -
"need is not belief"
"my friend, my friend i was born
doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue's wrangle,
the world's pottage, the rat's star."

[how many poems end with a palindrome?]

I Remember
"I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine."

Young
"Told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and painted light,
Elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight."

I can't believe that this is her second book. The poems are great. Out of all the audio recordings of Sexton reading, most of them have been from this book.