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Anne Sexton was a pain, in the real, physical sense. Every large family has a pain or two: an iridescent liar, a middle-aged infant, a little Iago. But somehow, in Sexton's case, it turned out that the pain was also entangled with a miracle: the miracle of her 45-year-long survival, for one thing, when such a terrible undertow was pulling her, and the miracle of her poems, or some of them at least -- the dark, intelligent objects that she floated toward shore before she went under.