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Flow Blue Sarah Kennedy 0-9709342-5-4 $13.00 ©2002 order this title       Sarah Kennedy published her first book of poems, From the Midland Plain, in a limited edition in 1999. She holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance Poetry from Purdue and an MFA in poetry from Vermont College. Winner of The Nebraska Review and Flyaway awards in poetry, she lives in Lexington, Virginia, and teaches at Mary Baldwin College.       What impresses me the most about Sarah Kennedy's Flow Blue is how her poems move us through time as their speaker struggles to unstrangulate her voice. Hers is an uncanny ability to allow language of the natural world to magnify and transform the human world of power relationships, where silence is both acquiescence and survival. These narratives are so precise they become a plural, so that by the end of the book, they include us all. Kennedy's poems become a terrifying conduit between rural beauty and brutality. As we hold this amazing collection up to the light, we see how its heartful language leaks like the flawed, runny paint in an antique plate into portraits brutish as a fingerprint of power. —Tracy Philpot, Judge Second Annual Elixir Press Book Awards	You will find no fashionable confessional poems in Flow Blue, nor will you find a shallow bitterness or an eagerness to render judgement. You will not find technique collapsing under the weight of emotional pain. What you will find is a courageous poetry by a young woman who looks dead-on at herself and her life and finds both terror and lyricism. —Kathryn Stripling Byer     Sarah Kennedy's Flow Blue reminds us of the urgency and necessity of the autobiographical lyric. Harrowing as the tale the book relates may be, Flow Blue is always informed by a fluent lyric grace and a deft formal precision, and displays a confidence and maturity of voice. Sarah Kennedy is a poet of exceptional promise. —David Wojahn
from Flow Blue
The Good Student You're slipping, my English teacher warns during the Shakespeare unit, but he doesn't know anything. I'm off to meet my first real lover, who drives an MG and slides tiny diamonds onto my fingers. The cheerleaders watch me step into his car. I'm dying to see you tied up, he smiles, forcing my arms to the corners of the motel bed. He knocks at houses where I baby sit on weekends: I can teach you about this stuff. The deaths are code for sex, he explains, but I don't care, always skipping quizzes now, always late: my classes, my period. He tosses me into the air one afternoon, dropping me once, twice, throwing me down— he's sorry—across a chair. Propped on pillows at home, I lie to bleed, then rise bone-white and shaking to show off my new gold choker to the other sophomore girls surrounding my bed.                        Nothing can stop me now. Not the split lip from my dad's slap. Not the bright shin bruise where he knocks me into the wall when I come home with a kiss- stained throat. Doesn't it make me Annabel Lee, doesn't it make me Catherine on the moors? The man who loves me circles my neck—All I have to do is squeeze. My knees weaken, the room rolls out of focus. Falling, I recall—How now, cousin, wherefore sink you down?—and giggle until he shakes my shoulders, Why didn't you bite or scratch or kick? I've learned to stay so thin he can lift me with one arm, while I sigh the way Beth Ann from drama club taught. Twirling my new jewelry, we practiced our low, movie-star voices, This is romance to die for.