Double Exposure by Sarah Kennedy

Double Exposure Reviews

• 
  Diann Blakely

  Poets with a single collection and those sponsored by less well-known presses, as was the case with Beth Ann Fennelly and Sarah Kennedy in 2001, can be overlooked at large gatherings and festivals. But as one who enjoys the tough-minded marriage of story and song, I made certain to catch these two's appearances at the Southern Festival of Books that year. Both native Midwesterners, Kennedy and Fennelly write poems that plumb love’s complexities, especially the kind that begins with our original families and becomes repeated, for better and for worse, with marriage and children.
  
  DOUBLE EXPOSURE, Kennedy’s award-winning collection published by the Cleveland State Poetry Center, uses verse as a vehicle for memoir, which achieves a moral imperative in her hands: memoir, for this poet, isn’t a means of navel-gazing or an excuse for solipsism; instead, it’s an art form that requires telling the truth unprettified by good manners or the comforts of beauty. Fennelly’s conversational and winningly humorous style doesn’t ignore the heart’s sorrows, as indicated by a poem titled “Not to Be Read at Your Wedding,” from her book OPEN HOUSE, published by Zoo Press and winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, which appeared with an introduction by David Baker, this year himself the winner of the Theodore Roethke Prize (
  http://www.svsu.edu/roethke/roethke-m... coincidentally enough, both writers are now with W. W. Norton, who reprinted Fennelly's début collection in 2009.
  
  Baker, also, has had been given a mile-high--in terms of empathy, eloquence, and keen-sightedness-- by the inimitable Lisa Russ Spaar, this year's winner of the Library of Virginia's highest honor, the Carole Weinstein Award (
  http://www.cavalierdaily.com/2011/10/...) in her weekly column, "Arts and Academe," which appears online from the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION (
  http://chronicle.com/blogs/arts/monda...), while Kennedy has a recent poem and brief essay explaining her newest, historically based work on the NEA site:
  http://www.nea.gov/features/writers/w... and Fennelly, who has since published additional books of poems and nonfiction, an excerpt from the last, UNMENTIONABLES, you can read on the Academy of American Poets site:
  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/pr...). All three of these poets--including the "tenderly" lyrical Baker--are hard-hitting and offer us work containing many accessible—and essential—pleasures.
  
  
  
  
  originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE / Village Voice Media, 2001 and updated November 2011
  
  
  
  
  
  originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE / Village Voice Media, 2001 and updated November 2011
• 
  Ned Balbo

  Sarah Kennedy’s third collection, Double Exposure, is the winner of the 2002 Cleveland State University Poetry Center competition and successor to the powerful investigations of Flow Blue (Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2002). Here, Kennedy explores anguished raw material-- the brutalities of male figures (father, boyfriend, ex-husband) -- in free verse that bears vivid witness to one woman’s turbulent life. Violence runs through the book- usually violence against women, as in “Second Story” in which the speaker’s stepson replicates his father’s failings by slapping his own girlfriend. Unavoidably, the political world finds expression in Kennedy’s life--from “Hey, half-dollar,” the schoolyard taunt that links her to the fallen leader, to the gender politics that fuel the cycle of abuse--but the force and clarity with which she breaks the codes of silence are ample proof of her empowerment through language. In these post-Confessional poems, powerful yet restrained, exposure is Kennedy’s purpose but never becomes merely reflexive; her secrets carry real weight, a genuine need to revealed--the very impulse her distinctive voice requires.
• 
  Sarah Lu

  The poems greatly reminded me of Natasha Tretheway's works. Pretty much, the reviews on the back echo my thoughts on it.