BOOKS
The Post Office: An Opera in Poems
Published by Grid Books | May 2026
“Like the librettos Gertrude Stein wrote for Virgil Thompson’s operas, and as in medieval morality or ‘mystery’ plays, the characters of Sexton’s profoundly skillful libretto are simultaneously human and allegorical personifications of conflicting aspects of our national trauma. Sexton’s language, a vernacular clear as a glass of water, focuses us on narrative details that evoke both the characters and the high-stake predicaments they wrestle with, including our history of racial hatred and violence and the battle over the right of queer people to marry.”
— Patrick Donnelly, author of Willow Hammer and Little-Known Operas
Site Specific
Sexton resides in the liminal spaces between an unaccountable and unkind time, and a time that is animate and exceptionally beautiful. She indeed sees fate as mercurial, much like the weather: delightful in its pleasant moments yet ever aware of the cruelty of past personal weaknesses, blind indifference, time wasted, and the petty grievances.
— Walter Holland, The Rumpus
Published by Grid Books | May 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946830-38-8
Drive
“Elaine Sexton enlarges on what Modernism observed. … she captures the verve of forward motion in arresting images and crisp lines. Her readers will happily ride shotgun, taking pleasure in Drive’s radiant perspective on the rush of life.”
– Joyce Peseroff, On the Seawall
“A sense of momentum thrums through Elaine Sexton’s new collection of poetry, Drive. And she reminds us of the life in almost everything, the mussel, the eggplant, the butter. ‘Shall we fast?” she asks. It’s not an option.”
– Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe
Published by Grid Books | April 2022
ISBN: 978-1-946830-14-2
Prospect/Refuge
Published by Sheep Meadow Press | Oct. 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937679-53-8
“Elaine Sexton lovingly crafts her poems with an attention to language that is painterly and agile, intimate and tender… She is the consummate painter of language, whose airy breadth leaves one to hear the simple music of her poems long after they have finished.”
— Walter Holland, Pleiades Book Review
Causeway
Published by New Issues Press | April 2008
ISBN: 978-1-930974-77-7
“There is no shortage of tension in Causeway. ... The work offers a set of thematic and material oppositions: city and country/seaside, intimacy and separation, anxiety and composure, the desire to get things right grating on the sense that something’s amiss.”
— Ron Slate, On the Seawall
Sleuth
Published by New Issues Press | April 2003
ISBN: 978-1-930974-29-6
“Though intensely personal, she never slips into sentimental introspection, thanks in part to a detached, forensic mood, and to a detective’s eye for the all-revealing detail that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.”
— Luke Gerwe, New Letters