Cover design by Michael McInnis
More Praise for young girl in the flower of time
Kathleen Hellen’s poems skip across the page, daring you to exhale, they scuttle in your
mouth and rattle in your heart. The young the girl the flower the time all speak at once,
grasping at connection in the wilderness and wildness of adolescence. You cannot look
away – the poignancy of vulnerability, the meanness of the world that seeks to bruise
the most tender petals – in these fiery poems of defilement, beauty and spirit triumph.
— Mary Buchinger, author of There Is Only the Sacred and the Desecrated
Kathleen Hellen’s poems are the coming-of-age experiences of a speaker who “hid
inside the hut / of breasts / the arch of thighs.” Imagery is striking: “ice formed into
the teeth that gobbled up the drainpipes, fangs on crusted eaves.” Rhythms sing: “i
lived in your skin, with you i was more myself than i had ever been.” Many poems take
linguistic risks. In them is the confusion, pain, and wonder of growing up in the Rust
Belt with “this wheezing zinc, this acrid blast of furnaces coking in the vats,” where
somehow “every year, the flowers reappear.”
— Andrena Zawinski, author of Born Under the Influence
the fifth way of wearing vermilion
Shadows were the masks of sentient beings. I could only see the husks.
She was there. Not the girl who said she was my sister. The woman
in red leaned in. It was true: He was not my father.
Darkness opened into orange into red. Lights like fireflies.
A lightness carried me over clotheslines flagged with sheets, over
tar and shingled rooftops, beyond the stunted trees and iron landscape.
Then: wisps of sail. The orange buoys startled. They hauled me in,
wrapped a towel around my shoulders. The only thing I kept
was the birth-red of a freckle on my forehead.
I remembered: a room, a window with no stars.
Smoke clung to her breathing.
About the Author
Kathleen Hellen’s debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington
Writers’ Publishing House. She is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin,
Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks. Hellen’s awards include the James Still Award,
the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and
Washington Square Review. Her work has been a finalist for The American Poetry Prize from
Settlement House, the Louise Bogan Award, the Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and the Stephen
Dunn Prize in Poetry. She is the recipient of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council
and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts.