Sarah Kennedy’s first book, From the Midland Plain, was published in 1999 by Tryon, a small press in North Carolina. Her second, Flow Blue, won the 2001 Elixir Press contest. She is a co-editor of Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia, from University of Virginia Press. She has a doctorate in Renaissance poetry from Purdue and an M.F.A. from Vermont College. She teaches at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton and lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia with her husband, Rod Smith.

“Kennedy’s narrative poems, many in unrhymed couplets that befit the stop-start retelling of child and sexual abuse, are horrific and spellbinding. A poem titled ‘Stone’ opens: ‘Will it always be there, swelling my side?’ The answer’s yes. Cathartic yet controlled, this is a mordant and powerful collection.” –Maxine Kumin

“Sarah Kennedy packs punch after punch of truth-telling in Double Exposure, her third book. She employs again the form of memoir-in-poems, a form that allows her to tell stories compressed with double entendre and graced by music. It’s a marvel how much she squeezes into every line, and how deftly she exposes an individual life caught in a sometimes brutal warp of family, gender, class, and religion. Her intelligence transcends them all.” –Natasha Saje

“What distinguishes these poems from other autobiographical lyrics is a tough linguistic precision coupled with a kind of sustained ferocity: Sarah Kennedy takes no prisoners. Hers are vivid and haunting poems.” –David Wojahn

More Information:

Sarah Kennedy Website

Verse Daily

NEA

The Cortland Review