Reviews for Transformations

The average rating for Transformations based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-16 00:00:00 Michelle Plataslipson A retelling of Grimm Fairy tales combined with some confessional verses. I feel like personally poetry is very hit and miss for me and I just didn't enjoy this that much. I also never really enjoyed Silvia Plath's poetry to be fair and Anne Sexton is similar in a sense. I also felt pretty uncomfortable reading Rapunzel with it's undertones of sexuality between an older woman and a younger woman because there are allegations of sexual abuse against Sexton from her own daughter and the whole time I was like please god let that not be what she's alluding to. Anyways the poems are okay, nothing that really moved me but it was cool to see things like the more blatant allusions made to sexual desire for red riding hood which I had heard of in other contexts as one interpretation of the subtext of the original story.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-05 00:00:00 Gift Cardholder Poetry is like wine to me. I enjoy it occasionally but I don't have enough knowledge or experience to write elaborate tasting notes. Like wine, I enjoy poetry on a more intangible level, the only difference is that of course, I am not more likely to go to bed with you if we end up reading poetry for the whole evening. Therefore, I won't write a proper review of Anne Sexton's Transformations. But even Kurt Vonnegut Jr didn't write anything sensible in his foreword to this edition. 'Transformations' are poetic retellings of Grimm's tales. This world is more than familiar to me. I used to live in their tales when I was a child. I read them over and over again and this was a nice way to revisit the world of my childhood. In Anne Sexton's versions of the famous fairy tales they all live creepily ever after. She doesn't change a thing, she just changes the lightning which makes everything a little bit more grotesque, and we realize that regardless to what our parents had us believe it wasn't always good that won. Sometimes the good lost. "Red Riding Hood" opens with Sexton's musings on deceivers and pretenders. Like a wolf dressed as a grandmother we all sometimes put our more benign face on when facing the world: "And I. I too. Quite collected at cocktail parties, meanwhile in my head I'm undergoing open-heart surgery. The heart, poor fellow, pounding on his little tin drum with a faint death beat. The heart, that eyeless bettle, enormous that Kafka beetle, running panicked through his maze, never stopping one foot after the other one hour after the other until he gags on an apple and it's all over."