Witch Wife by
"Petrosino delights in unsettling the familiar with startling results, whether channeling Anne Sexton or William Blake. Her stylish innovation refashions traditional forms that insist on repetition." --Harryette Mullin "Petrosino is at the forefront of a deeply heterogeneous, expansive poetic movement, one that is transforming traditional lyric subjectivity into a more inclusive, complex space." --Boston Review The poems ofWitch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one's given body. They are also concerned with dismantling received ideas about contemporary American womanhood. What does it mean to be a wife or mother who feels ambivalent about motherhood? How are these roles further complicated for women of color in the United States? In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems, and freeverse, Kiki Petrosino summons history's ghosts--the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft--and sings them to life. Kiki Petrosino is the author of two previous poetry collections:Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013) andFort Red Border (2009), all from Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared inBest American Poetry, theNew York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Tin House, and online atPloughshares. She is founder and co-editor of the poetry journalTransom, and Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.
White Blood by
In her fourth full-length book,White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem 'The Shop at Monticello,' she writes: 'I'm a black body in this Commonwealth, which turnedblack bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I'm a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.' Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino's name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.
Hymn for the Black Terrific by
The poems in this, Kiki Petrosino's second collection, fulfill the promise of her debut effort,Fort Red Border, and further extend the terms of our expectations for this extraordinary young poet. The book is in two sections, the first a focused collection of wildly inventive lyrics that take as launch pad such far flung subjects as allergenesis, the contents and significance of swamps, a revised notion of marriage, and ancestors--both actual and dreamed. The eponymous second section is a cogent series, or long poem, based on a persona named "the eater," who, along with the poems themselves, storms voraciously through tablefuls of Chinese delicacies (each poem in the series takes its titles from an actual Chinese dish), as well as through doubts and confident proclamations from regions of an exploratory self.Hymn for the Black Terrific has Falstaffian panache; it is a book of pure astonishment. Kiki Petrosino is the author ofFort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009) and the co-editor ofTransom, an independent on-line poetry journal. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems have appeared inTin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, andThe New York Times. Petrosino teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.
