Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin's Rollicking Poetical Adventure, featuring some other more-or-less related people

I joke but really, this book was overwhelmed by Sexton and Kumin, and everything else felt like an afterthought. I take particular umbrage with the clumsy handling of the lives of the two artists in this book, Barbara Swan and Mariana Pineda. While Doherty can discuss their private lives at length, she has no grasp of how to place their work within an art historical or art world context, and they end up even more steamrolled by Sexton and Kumin.

Doherty is also incredibly self-conscious about her decision to write about the very white environment of the Radcliffe Institute, and while she handles it well at first (discussing the philosophy behind the admission process of the Institute and the racial labor relations that resulted from the distribution of the Institute's stipends) she does fumble it with an incredibly out-of-place chapter about Alice Walker, who wasn't connected to the Equivalents of the title. In any other circumstance, this likely would have been just a blip on my radar, but it adds disproportionate stress to the already clumsy structure of the rest of the book.

I was disappointed, but perhaps someone with more interest in literary history would have enjoyed this more than I did.