In his collection of essays, The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo advises poets to "make your first line interesting and immediate. Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things." Sarah Kennedy has heeded that "smarty’s" advice in her new book, Flow Blue, winner of the second annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards, creating a collection of striking poems that move immediately to the "heat" of the action. The poems in Flow Blue cohesively flow together, as the title intimates, to carefully follow one woman’s experiences from adolescence to womanhood.
           In this exceptional collection, Kennedy presents moving lyrics while also making subtle and insightful commentaries on our culture’s attitudes towards adolescent girls and young women. No poem in the collection is more poignant than, "In the Beginning" which functions as a prologue. Without being didactic or sentimental, the poem uses the confessional voice to comment on the impact gender roles and the concept of sexual possession have on young women. The speaker is "trained" by her father to acquiesce to men and this behavior is continually reinforced by the other women in her life:

My father
was reaching toward some young woman
while my mother looked away…my brother-in-law
whispered week's later, Let's keep this
in the family… when my sister shrugged, humor him,
all men act like that…

A powerful introduction–this poem sets the tone of the whole collection and presents the political and the private in a vulnerable yet candid voice.
           Each poem in the collection builds on themes presented in the prologue poem and illustrates the speaker’s view of the world and how her relationships with men change as she grows older. The first section of the book focuses on the brutally abusive relationship between the speaker and her father. This relationship informs all the speaker’s experiences with men and we can see evidence of this in the first few poems of the collection. In the poem "Horror Show: 1975" the speaker connects her relationship with her new boyfriend to her father, almost blurring their roles: "I let him whisper in my ear / words gentle as the Christmas card my dad / left on my pillow." In the "Good Student" the bitter power conflict is further exposed as the speaker struggles towards sexual independence and the father is unable to relinquish possession of her:

Nothing can stop me now
…Not/the bright shin bruise where he knocks me
into the wall when I come home with a kiss-
stained neck.

This struggle is explicitly played out in the rest of the book as various men replace the role of her father, until finally her husband takes the same violent possession of her.
           In the second section of the collection, the speaker is a young wife and mother and the poems have a resigned tone: "I whisper my new name, trying / to fit myself to this picture: married adult." The title poem, "Flow Blue" further illustrates the speaker’s feelings of displacement in a world she is not yet prepared to understand: "The shop owner asks if I like / what I have chosen. I don’t know what it is / and he laughs. What would a young girl like you know about old things?" Kennedy expands on the speaker’s dilemma in the poem "Grounded" where the speaker passively asserts power over her husband by hiding from him. "He will never find me," Kennedy writes, "curled here / under the last stalks of the garden. Let’s go / he yells."
           In the third section, "American Erotic," the speaker begins to find her own identity and the power struggle rises to the surface of the marriage echoing again the relationship between the speaker and her father. In "Mascara," the speaker is annoyed with her friend’s servile behavior toward the man she is dating, but that criticism is quickly turned on herself when she makes the connection between her friend and her own responses to her husband’s abuses:

She lifts her chin to beam—O
Bernie—and I want to slap her, though she’s
only titling her face the way I did
earlier tonight."

          The strength of Kennedy’s poems comes from their ability to tackle the political and the dramatic disinterestedly. By using the background action to communicate the broader story she is able to blend the singular with the plural while avoiding heavy handedness. In "Horror Show: 1975" the movies and television shows viewed by the speaker are a metaphor for our culture’s perception of women: "Werewolves liked / a smooth skin too." Kennedy brings this metaphor to the foreground when she applies it to the speaker’s boyfriend. "Vampires," she writes, "always wanted the pretty / ones. So when at last he appeared–the sweet / red streak of his car following me…" She demonstrates in this single line how these cultural messages impose an image of victim or prey on young woman.
           What makes this book so compelling, however, is its refusal to surrender to hopelessness, illustrated beautifully in the final section where the speaker is able to move towards autonomy for the first time. In "Ewe," the final poem, we watch this discovery of independence unfold. The poem begins with statements that imply dependency more than decisiveness in aiding the ewe’s delivery: "I might have plunged/my hands" or "I probably raised my unsteady self." It isn’t until she feels desperate and her husband ignores her cries of "Where the hell are you" that the language becomes more active and she reacts fully to the situation:

[B]ut at last
I cleared my eyes, thrust one hand deep
inside her, found the small hooves, pointed
backward and pulled.

It is this successful action of independence that leaves her "astonished" and able to reflect on her ability to remove herself from a difficult situation and produce a new life "glistening with the oily traces of all/the ways this might have ended."