Contemporary Authors

• Fort Red Border Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY ), 2009
• Hymn for the Black Terrific Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY), 2013
• Witch Wife Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY), 2017

1. Witch wife : poems LCCN 2017002605 Type of material Book Personal name Petrosino, Kiki, 1979- author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Witch wife : poems / by Kiki Petrosino. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Louisville, KY : Sarabande Books, 2017. Projected pub date 1709 Description pages cm ISBN 9781946448033 (hardcover : acid-free paper) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. Hymn for the black terrific : poems LCCN 2013005921 Type of material Book Personal name Petrosino, Kiki, 1979- Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Hymn for the black terrific : poems / Kiki Petrosino. Edition First Edition Published/Produced Louisville, Kentucky : Sarabande Books, [2013] ©2013 Description 59 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781936747597 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2014 025527 CALL NUMBER PS3616.E868 H96 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 3. Fort red border : poems LCCN 2008041310 Type of material Book Personal name Petrosino, Kiki, 1979- Main title Fort red border : poems / by Kiki Petrosino. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created Louisville, KY : Sarabande Books, 2009. Description x, 87 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781932511741 (pbk. : acid-free paper) Shelf Location FLM2013 010105 CALL NUMBER PS3616.E868 F67 2009 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) CALL NUMBER PS3616.E868 F67 2009 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Poetry Foundation Website - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kiki-petrosino

  Kiki Petrosino
  b. 1979

  Mickie Winters
  Poet Kiki Petrosino was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of an African American mother and an Italian American father. She earned a BA from the University of Virginia, an MA in humanities from the University of Chicago, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Fort Red Border (2009), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), and Witch Wife (2017).

  Fort Red Border—the title is an anagram of “Robert Redford”—addresses love, intimacy, food, race, and contemporary culture. The first section of the book is a series of imaginative lyrics spoken by a woman engaged in a relationship with Robert Redford. In a Rain Taxi conversation, Haines Easton commented: “Petrosino’s speaker seeks to untangle sense, to make sense, to perceive and revel in sense—and seeks to do so free of the trappings of an at-large, hegemonic culture intent on bending her impulses to its will.”

  Petrosino spent two years teaching English and Italian at a private school in Switzerland. She co-edits Transom and currently teaches at the University of Louisville.

• - https://louisville.edu/english/people/current-faculty-new/kiki-petrosino

  Kiki Petrosino
  Associate Professor & Director of Creative Writing

  HM 318D
  502-852-2186
  cmpetr04@louisville.edu
  About
  Kiki Petrosino (Director of Creative Writing) is the author of three books of poetry: Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), and Fort Red Border (2009), all from Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Tin House, and on-line at Ploughshares. She is the founder and co-editor of Transom, an independent on-line poetry journal. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville. Her awards include a residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat and research fellowships from the University of Louisville’s Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

  Education
  MFA (English / Poetry), University of Iowa
  MA (Humanities), University of Chicago
  BA (English), University of Virginia

  Witch Wife (Sarabande, 2017)
  Hymns for the Black Terrific (Sarabande, 2015)
  Fort Red Border: Poems (Sarabande, 2009)
  Founder, Transom
  (more)

• PBS - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/poetry/kiki-petrosino-poet

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I think about that experience when I think about the beginning of my own life as a poet — because poems are songs, the first poems were songs,” she told Segal. “That’s where I’m coming from.”
  Poet Kiki Petrosino asks: Can people change?
  Poetry Sep 21, 2015 2:43 PM EST
  Kiki Petrosino’s poetry began as a child in the backseat of her mother’s car.
  Many nights, the family would drive to and from Catonsville Community College near Baltimore to pick up Petrosino’s father, a public school teacher who taught evening classes on the side. And on those trips, Petrosino’s mother would play Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 Countdown and ask her and her sister: What’s happening in this song? How is the person feeling, and what happened to them to make them write the song?
  “I think about that experience when I think about the beginning of my own life as a poet — because poems are songs, the first poems were songs,” she said. “That’s where I’m coming from.”
  Now, Petrosino asks those same questions using poetry to deconstruct memory, time and the changes that have taken place in her life.
  “I think that I’m always contemplating the key question of, can people change? And I really still don’t know the answer,” she said. “Some days I think yes, it seems very apparent to me that people can change and people do change all the time. But on other days, I think no — people are fundamentally who they are and what we perceive as change is just us discovering new things about ourselves and the people around us. It’s a mystery that my poetry helps me investigate.”
  Petrosino grew up in north Baltimore before her family moved 45 minutes away from the city, across the border with Pennsylvania. While working toward a degree from the University of Virginia, she spent a semester in Florence — an experience that she said encouraged her to live in Switzerland after college, teaching English and Italian at The American School in Switzerland.
  Her poem “Pastoral” began as a meditation on her time in Europe. “It’s me looking back and thinking, to what extent [am] I the same person that I was at that time and to what extent am I a completely different person?” she said.
  The villanelle form, which employs repetition, was a starting point for the rhythm of the poem, which moves back and forth between variations on similar images and sounds. Serving as an anchor for those images is a question: Where did it start?
  Petrosino is still asking that question herself. “It can have a different answer every time,” she said. “And even though it can be uncertain to have a multitude of answers, I think it’s an authentic response to the question.”

• Spalding University Website - https://spalding.edu/blog/kiki-petrosino-joins-spalding-mfa-writing-poetry-faculty/

  Top poet Kiki Petrosino joins Spalding MFA in Writing faculty

  Spalding University staff13 Dec 2017

  Kiki Petrosino
  Accomplished poet Kiki Petrosino has joined the poetry faculty of Spalding University’s low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. She will start teaching in the Spring 2018 semester, which begins with a residency in May.
  Petrosino is author of the poetry collections Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013) and Fort Red Border (2009), all from Sarabande Books. She is also author of three chapbooks: Black Genealogy (Brain Mill Press, 2017), Doubloon Oath (Flying Objects Press, 2016) and The Dark Is Here (Forklift, Ink, 2011). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Jubilat and Tin House and online at Ploughshares. She is founder and co-editor of Transom, an independent online poetry journal. Her work has received three nominations for the Pushcart Prize and was listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 2016.
  Since 2014, Petrosino has served as associate professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of Louisville, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate creative writing courses as well as literature courses. From 2010 to ’14, she was an assistant professor at U of L.
  Petrosino serves on the advisory board of Louisville Literary Arts and on the board of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. She is series editor of the Mineral Point Poetry Series of Brain Mill Press. She is a committee member for the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 and is a manuscript evaluator for the Korea Literature Translation Institute.
  Petrosino received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She holds a master of arts in humanities degree from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s in English from the University of Virginia. Her awards include a residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat and research fellowships from U of L’s Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

• Kiki Petrosino Website - http://www.kikipetrosino.com/

  Kiki Petrosino is the author of three books of poetry: Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013) and Fort 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 in Poetry, Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, Tin House and on-line at Ploughshares. She is founder and co-editor of Transom, an independent on-line poetry journal. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she directs the Creative Writing Program. She also teaches part-time in the brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University. Her awards include a residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat and research fellowships from the University of Louisville's Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

• I Thought I Was New Here - http://ithoughtiwasnewhere.blogspot.com/2011/06/at-bottom-of-shadow-interview-with-kiki.html

  Quoted in Sidelights: came to me during a time in my life when I felt deeply wounded on a bunch of levels, Some of this wounded-ness had to do with romantic love, but most of it was about me learning to accept the circumstances of my life at that point.”
  “The Redford I found in my poems is really a constellation of desires for lots of things—certainty being chief among them. This is, perhaps, similar to how Beatrice embodies all the virtues that Dante yearns for in his epic. There was a real Beatrice, of course, but that person is not the angelic guide whom Dante crafts into being.”
  Wednesday, June 1, 2011
  At the Bottom of a Shadow: An interview with Kiki Petrosino

  It’s very quiet in this room. It feels like
  being at the bottom

  of a shadow, at the bottom of
  a room. (“Question”)

  Kiki Petrosino is the author of the poetry collection, Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009). She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in FENCE, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, Forklift Ohio, and elsewhere. Her poem, "You Have Made a Career of Not Listening," was anthologized in Best New Poets. Her awards include a post-graduate writing fellowship from the University of Iowa and two staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has recently moved to Louisville from Iowa City, where she worked for five years as a Program Assistant at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. She is an assistant professor at the University of Louisville, where she teachers literature and creative writing. Check out her author page, featuring a great interview about her work, at Sarabande’s website.

  GL: Robert Redford, the comically romantic muse who stars in the first section of your anagrammatically titled and uber-wonderful collection of poems, Fort Red Border, exhibits a mixture of a glib, amorous proficiency and dialogical absurdity—he says the darndest things: "You float around my house all day / just like a little cloud of sweetness." Redford's such an interesting choice for a poetic subject qua beloved because he's so…meretricious. For example, I noticed when watching one of his movies not too long ago that he seemed really adept at putting on and taking off his glasses. That is, he appears to prioritize all the wrong things, have little to no negative capability, and somehow still be appealing. So, did you choose Redford (as your Beatrice) in part because his polished veneer allowed for projection and fantastical extrapolation? Do you think that the speaker's paramnesiac trysts with Redford show us, more often than not, the way that modern love works? That we fall in love with images that allow us to dramatize a monodramatical affair with the self?

  KP: Yikes. I hope that we moderns haven’t succeeded in creating a world where love is nothing more than a series of “monodramatical affairs with the self.” The self can be such a stifling, terrifying little locket to cram yourself into. I once heard the poet Dan Beachy-Quick say that love is a leap across empty space. And I believe that for love to work, there ought to be something real on the other side of that leap. But can I confess something? I don’t think the poems in my “Redford” series are love poems at all. And I don’t consider the “Redford” who emerges in those pieces to be a romantic figure, painted in the usual shades of eros (or whatever the silver screen is made out of). I’m glad that you’ve mentioned Beatrice here, because Dante’s journey was on my mind as I wrote these poems. This series came to me during a time in my life when I felt deeply wounded on a bunch of levels. Some of this wounded-ness had to do with romantic love, but most of it was about me learning to accept the circumstances of my life at that point. I think my Redford emerged as a possible answer to my hurt. The certainty that I associated with the Redford archetype was like a cool glass of water or something. The contrast nourished me, and was generative of new thought. For me, the “Redford” poems are artifacts of a highly personal, interior thought process—yep, a long monodramatical affair. So I always hesitate when asked why I “chose” Redford as interlocutor. It didn’t feel like a choice; more like a surfacing. The Redford I found in my poems is really a constellation of desires for lots of things—certainty being chief among them. This is, perhaps, similar to how Beatrice embodies all the virtues that Dante yearns for in his epic. There was a real Beatrice, of course, but that person is not the angelic guide whom Dante crafts into being. That Beatrice, the one who calls Dante by name in Canto XXXI of the Paradiso, represents Dante’s best self, in both a spiritual and artistic sense. And I think Dante knows that all along. He knowingly invests her with all that is good and wise and pure so that he can strive towards that. When we hear Beatrice interrogating Dante, and when Dante answers her in the poem, he’s actually in dialogue with two conflicting aspects of himself. Dante as Seeker. Dante as Keeper of Wisdom. So I’ve always read Dante’s Beatrice—and, for that matter, his Virgil—not as true characters, but as forces that come from within the poet; they give voice to his inner life. I’d like to think that a pale copy of that might happen in my series; that desire gives rise to a revelatory encounter with the imagination, and that this encounter is an opportunity for redemption.

  GL: In one of your poems, "Canton Thirteen," you describe "the slender rise of [Redford's] collarbone" as "[making] a ridge / under my cheek, like the worn fishtraps they've found in dry / moat beds near the Tower of London, delicate forked machines / of flint and willow, no bigger than a thmubspan." I remember seeing a poem you wrote as far back as 2003 that featured a reference to fishtraps. I don't know if I remember it correctly, but I believe the poem said something like this: "Love knits a fishtrap loose in water." Why does this image offer you such abiding fascination? And what do fishtraps have to do with love?

  KP: You’re right to point out that certain lines tend to stay with me. There really is a very old wicker fishtrap on display at the Tower of London, and when I saw it as a young tourist, I thought, what a beautiful machine. The thing is, I have no idea what fishtraps may have to do with love, which probably explains why it’s taken me multiple poems to work through that image. Perhaps it’s a question of sound. I have to confess that, as a museum-goer, I often find myself more taken with the explanatory notes that accompany an artifact than I am with the artifact itself. The note next to the fishtrap said, “Fishtrap, willow and flint,” which has such a wonderful and wistful sound to it. As if someone were speaking a command, or a wish, into the empty air, and this was the result. As a poet, I’m interested in how desire can bring a world into being. And I’ve learned that the laws of such worlds may have very little to do with objective reality. For example: in my memory, that fishtrap was as transparent as Wonder Woman’s jet. It seemed like nothing more than a white clasp woven from extremely tender shreds of bark. But I just did an image search for “Fishtrap, Tower of London,” and it turns out the real fishtrap resembles a giant Triscuit ™ more than anything else. Awesome! It doesn’t change anything for me. I love them both.

  GL: The second section of Fort Red Border, titled Otolaryngology, begins with the prose poem "White." The poem details in stunningly beautiful language the perhaps typical or maybe most essential characteristics and actions of the color/figure White: "White rises from her set of tines…White drags her swordwhite self packed down in rice." White does and is many amazing things, but toward the end of the poem, you write of White that "her broken breath [is] the tree you break yourself against." This line struck me because I remember you using this phrase to describe one of Shakespeare's sonnets; you said something about how one of the sonnets features a "voice that breaks against the rock of itself." At any rate, it seems to be an idea especially important to you: that a poem constructs its own method and means of destroying itself in such a way that reveals ever more meanings while never providing a totalizing account of meaning. In "White," interestingly, the catalog of descriptions and actions enriches our understanding of White, but never finalizes it. We can only guess at White's motivations, and we can only guess at the extent of White's figurative relationship with the color white. Even the last line of the poem promises more violence to come, not closure. White remains an active and dangerous force, but not an agent that helps resolve or fully account for its meaning. Which leads me to wonder if you think (your) poetry is most revealing, dynamic, or moving when it attempts to mean violently, to complicate and/or proliferate meanings, instead of tapering toward some kind of meditative or epiphanic conclusion?

  KP: Well, the connection between violence and meaning isn’t something I’ve really considered in relation to my own poetry. But now that you mention it, maybe I am hostile to the notion of fixed definitions. Kiki smash! In fact, one of the first poems I can remember writing was called “Fork,” and it was a series of associative definitions of the word (i.e., “an extension of the tongue,” “an outstretched arm with flaring silver sleeve,” etc.). I chose to lineate the poem in the manner of a dictionary entry and to include a phonetic spelling of “fork.” There was something empowering (to my high-school self) about proliferating the possible meanings of this rather utilitarian word. I felt the same way while writing “White.” We all think we know what “white” means, but it doesn’t just lie there on the page. It’s a word that moves through the world all the time, like a glacier. And like a glacier, it gathers some things into itself and crushes others to smithereens. There are times when white appears to open itself up to our view (“The Great White Way,” “White Light/White Heat,” and my favorite: “Whitesnake”), and there are other moments, particularly in America, when the idea of white excludes (“Whites Only,” “White flight.”) If I took a hole-punch, or a garden spade—or if I drilled through the wall—could I find another way into white? Could I kick down the door and find myself, somehow, in someone else’s white—maybe even your white? The thing is, just when it seems possible to do this—to transgress the definitional boundaries of a word in order to generate new meanings that I like better—that same word will come roaring back at me with a roundhouse kick. For example: when I visited Nigeria a few years ago, I overheard the shopkeepers referring to me as “white.” This is something that wouldn’t happen in America, where I’m a “person of color” due to my mixed heritage. Neither descriptor has anything to do with my actual skin color, but yet here’s this word, this color, this word “white,” that gets all freighted with meaning to the point that it serves as shorthand for a whole host of other physical and cultural attributes. In Nigeria, the word “white” actually had the power to kick my ass, because it showed up and attached itself to me in an unexpected way. It engulfed me for a short time, forcing me into an extremely uncomfortable bear hug. In short, “white” is a word that constantly reminds me that I have not mastered it. It’s an extremely solemn word, because it can be about space and eternity and beauty, but it’s also a dangerous word for those exact same reasons. I can’t fully account for white, but I keep unfolding it. I keep trying to break it open.

  GL: Okay. So your poem "Secret Ninja" is something of a crowd pleaser. I've read it to a handful of people over the past month or two and they inevitably love it. But the poem, aside from being tender and funny and inventive, is all about adolescent suffering. The speaker catalogs a number of things she would like "smash," and does smash, I guess, in her imagination--things she hates, things that irritate or perhaps traumatize her, like gym teachers. The speaker wants to enact some kind of clandestine transformation that would render the speaker powerful, magnificent. First, I'd like to know what kind of secret ninja transformation you wanted to enact when you were young? And, second, I wonder if the narrative of such transformations, found in comic books, action flicks and fantasy lit, have affected the way you write?

  KP: My dear Greg, I wanted what every young girl wants: a total makeover. The kind of makeover whereby your garden-variety blushing weirdo (who, each day, carefully pins a Starfleet combadge to her uniform blazer) might magically transform into a slender orchid of a lass. I wanted long platinum hair, vanilla-scented shampoo, a Fossil watch, an emerald-green prom dress, and perfect, squared-off teeth. I also wanted a British accent. How I suffered. Certainly, books and movies helped me out. I watched Sabrina about a million times during my high school years, and I still love both the original 1954 film and the 1995 remake. (“I have learnt how to live... how to be in the world and of the world, and not just to stand aside and watch. And I will never, never again run away from life. Or from love, either…”) I don’t know if such films have exerted a direct influence on my writing, but the archetype of transformation—the whole ugly-duckling-becomes-swan-and-proceeds-to-rock-the-mic fantasy—is certainly alive and well in my imagination. As far as writing goes, I believe the page is a realm. It can be a space for enacting transformations in language. It’s good to be confident when you approach the page, but not arrogant. After all, the page will not be impressed by your kicky new haircut and French verbs. The page wants results. I don’t think I’d be a poet now if I hadn’t suffered through my terrifically dorky adolescence. My identity as an outsider forced me to become a good observer of things, and allowed me to cultivate an inner life that continues to sustain me today. Qapla!

  GL: The third section of your book is comprised of a series of valentine poems. One of these poems describes the speaker's trip to the butcher's, where she orders "the perfect amount" of meat. The speaker goes on to say that she finds food "ingenious" because she can successfully order "some of the food" and "Not [just] any food"; that is, she can get exactly what she wants. But with love, well, "You can't order some of the love" because "you get the wrong love" or "the wrong amount." Were the valentine poems an attempt to grapple with and explore this problem: trying to order a certain kind of love and rarely-to-never getting what you want? If not, please set me straight.

  KP: The conceit that governs those lines came from my early study of French. In that language, you can’t just say that you want to buy (for example) some cheese; you have to say that you want “some of the cheese.” In other words, you have to stake out a claim to your personal smidgen of cheese as separate from the total amount of cheese that exists in the universe (“Je voudrais du fromage”). In an instant, the particularity of what you want is juxtaposed against the totality of what’s possible. This contrast reminds you that you’re just a speaker in the midst of a larger system. You can’t have all the cheese in the universe (says French) but not for the reasons you think. You can’t have all the cheese because the truth of cheese—the cheese—is so huge that it belongs to everyone. The cheese belongs to French (says French) but maybe you can have a little. If you ask politely. It’s all very reassuring, at least to the non-native speaker. But when we move to matters of the heart, you’re right: Cupid doesn’t take special orders. Like artistic inspiration, true love probably belongs to the realm of the unspeakable. Just as there are some poems that seem to drift from view the more you try to pin them to the page, true love must surface in its own way.

  GL: It's been a couple years now since Fort Red Border was published, and even longer since you wrote many of these poems--some of them date back to 2004, right? So, what direction has work drifted in since? Are you writing more Redfordian poems--fantastical narrative/dramatic poems--more self-broken, sound-conscious poems like "Or," new stuff that fuses these modes, or Planet Weird poems that defy categorization. In short, what are you working on these days and how's that going?

  KP: Right now, I’m working steadily on a new manuscript of poems and adjusting to some exciting career changes. This past fall, I joined the faculty at the University of Louisville, so I now have the chance to teach and write full time. I’m also co-editing a new electronic journal of poetry, Transom, which I launched with fellow poet Dan Rosenberg. In January 2011, a new chapbook of mine, The Dark is Here, was published by Forklift, Ink. And this past April, The New York Times published my poem, “Allergenesis,” as part of a spring-themed Op Ed page. These days, it feels good to write poems that don’t mention the pronoun “I.” It’s great fun to escape from the locket of the self, to explore other terrain in language. Repetition and musical incantation remain important to me, so some of my new poems attempt to thread particular sounds together. Sometimes I do find myself returning to the fantastical narrative/dramatic realm, and I’m working on a series of prose poems featuring a recurring character called “the eater.” I’m several poems into that series now, and I’m not sure where the eater wants to go next—maybe nowhere. For the past few months, I’ve just been writing one poem at a time and liking that phenomenon. Mostly I’m trying to listen and follow my intuition rather than force poems onto the page. It’s a process of seeking and revelation.

“not only masterful poems but mighty incantations.” “utterly spellbinding.”
Witch Wife

Briana Shemroske
Booklist. 114.7 (Dec. 1, 2017): p16.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Witch Wife.
By Kiki Petrosino.
Dec. 2017. 60p. Sarabande, $16.95 (9781946448033). 811.
"Long ago, I was a figlia with a fever," Petrosino (Hymn for the Black Terrific, 2013) writes in "Scarlet." Petrosino's third collection does unfold much like a magic-tinged fever dream, traversing forests, "fairy house[s]," and the "war zone" of the body to conjure up mothers and wives, daughters and ghosts. Delivering intoxicating variations on the sestina and villanelle, Petrosino employs repetition to spectacular effect. In "Twenty-One," for example, Petrosino offers an echoing catalog of the carefree age: "Olive orchard, sunflower farm. / Pastasciutta, freckled arms." In "Political Poem," Petrosino revamps Martin Luther King Jr.'s revered take on "the arc of the moral universe." "So let my body move towards justice," the speaker commands. And in the breathtaking "Prospera," the poet summons a lost daughter: "Every third thought is my grave girl / waltzing in her wedding gown of wire." In Petrosino's singular world, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange, suddenly irresistible, settles deep in the bones. Sparkling with sly wordplay and fantastical imagery, these are not only masterful poems but mighty incantations. Utterly spellbinding. --Briana Shemroske
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shemroske, Briana. "Witch Wife." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036140/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5dd99e89. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A519036140

Petrosino, Kiki. Hymn for the Black Terrific

Annalisa Pesek
Library Journal. 138.15 (Sept. 15, 2013): p77+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Petrosino, Kiki. Hymn for the Black Terrific. Sarabande. 2013.59p. ISBN 9781936747597. pap. $14.95. POETRY
Petrosino's second book after her well-received debut, Fort Red Border (love poems to an imagined Robert Redford), begins as a lyrical rush: "If kept the colored if of knife, the colored feet, & kept a folio behind a door outsized. My will to much, outsized, that colored if.... If you, my scrim, my awl, behind a door should sleep, & then--if I should come, in swarms of dark?" These poems have an edge, and there's a flair for strangeness in the fragmented fines: "I live in a country they/ didn't leave for me. My color secretes/ like taffy through my pores, or should. But I'm less/ polite when pulled. Try to tell by the kidneys." The book's final section introduces the "eater," whose "mind is dark as drink" and whose relationship to food, love, and the world at large is unusual and wild. This is the point when readers may start asking questions, and the poem will answer without giving itself away too easily. VERDICT Petrosino is a rising young poet whose work libraries will want to own for readers looking for fresh talent.--Annalisa Pesek, Library Journal
Pesek, Annalisa
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pesek, Annalisa. "Petrosino, Kiki. Hymn for the Black Terrific." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2013, p. 77+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A342874528/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=058db6a5. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A342874528
Quoted in Sidelights: “a fine and original book of poetry, highly recommended.”
Fort Red Border

Small Press Bookwatch. (Oct. 2009):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Fort Red Border
Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200, Louisville, KY 40205
9781932511741 $14.95 www.sarabandebooks.org 1-800-283-3572
Poems are naturally dialogues, and knowing the target gives them extra meaning and subtext. "Fort Red Border" is a collection of poetry from Kiki Petrosino, taking a unique path in the body of her work. Posing a conversation between the poet and icon Robert Redford, she presents intriguing stories and verse that have a flavor all their own. "Fort Red Border" is a fine and original book of poetry, highly recommended. "Virginia": Beneath a tender flitch of skin, the grease/ants make & traffic./O brown fliskmahoy/of speed./O limit case./Why linger/at this roadside?/Why stretch your bloody ankles/into the sun's mouth?/Here, the redstern filaree/spins her basal rosette--your broken hands/catch down in tangles. But don't you smell the wild/bergamo? The tarnished wheel of knapweed/at your crown? How the dirt is rasping/O my trackside love, my age--
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fort Red Border." Small Press Bookwatch, Oct. 2009. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A209903904/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3f10aa45. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A209903904
Quoted in Sidelights: “crackles in her stunning third collection,” “situates the body as a vessel for stories of both being and becoming.”
Witch Wife

Publishers Weekly. 264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p73.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Witch Wife
Kiki Petrosino. Sarabande, $16.95 (80p) ISBN 978-1-946448-03-3

Petrosino (Hymn for the Black Terrific) crackles in her stunning third collection, as she dives deep into the ephemeral powers of the body, particularly those of black women. She examines the ways in which one's body plays a part in shaping personal identity and what it means to be a woman in modern society. In "Young," Petrosino reflects on being a teenager, lushly detailing how during that tumultuous period emotions can feel inescapable. She writes, "& I, in my runny custard body/ with its buried corkscrew of hate/ tell the tree my story-songs/ & think God can really hear." In other poems, such as "New South," she discusses how histories passed down from mother to daughter manifest in the physical body. She says, "am born/ light girl, light girl/ each step blessed but slant/ born in procession/ already my mother, her mother/ the same her mother, then/ her mother the same." Petrosino seems to speak of maternal history as something that is infused into a daughter at birth. A similar idea crops up in "Ghosts" and "Prospera," in which mothers and daughters maintain dependent relationships with deep roots. Cosmic images blend with the familiar and domestic to create an all-encompassing reading experience. Petrosino situates the body as a vessel for stories of both being and becoming. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Witch Wife." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 73. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262083/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0c6f6966. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A517262083
Quoted in Sidelights: “sharp, witty sequences,”
“reveal a poet who has more fun with language, and who shows more range, than most.”
Fort Red Border

Publishers Weekly. 256.29 (July 20, 2009): p125.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Fort Red Border
Kiki Petrosino. Sarabande (Consortium, dist.), $14.95 (104p) ISBN 978-1-932511-74-1
The sharp, witty sequences in Petrosino's debut reveal a poet who has more fun with language, and who shows more range, than most. The titular series, whose moniker uses the same letters as "Robert Redford," describes an imaginary affair with him, highlighting their differences in taste, in status, in race: "I gather my afro into a plain elastic hoop ... Redford's face goes coltish & aware." Petrosino has more to say about lust and romance and social class than Redford's celebrity. Other series put more pressure on the sounds of words, in the propulsive sentences of her prose poems or in irregularly rhymed short lines: "The field saint in my skin/who rakes:// I balm. I slake." Ten poems all called "Valentine" include kiss-offs, come-hithers and advice: "Ordering food/ is really ordering some of the food ... But:/ You can't order some of the love." Drawing on popular culture, invoking sex often and flirting, or trying to shock, Petrosino rings some of the same bells as Frederick Seidel. But she repeats herself a lot less often, and her jokes are her own generation's: "Who would win, Jack White or Jack Black?" Her poems should attract anybody who wants to find out. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fort Red Border." Publishers Weekly, 20 July 2009, p. 125. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A204319141/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23389e73. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A204319141

Shemroske, Briana. "Witch Wife." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036140/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5dd99e89. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018. Pesek, Annalisa. "Petrosino, Kiki. Hymn for the Black Terrific." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2013, p. 77+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A342874528/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=058db6a5. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018. "Fort Red Border." Small Press Bookwatch, Oct. 2009. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A209903904/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3f10aa45. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018. "Witch Wife." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 73. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262083/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0c6f6966. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018. "Fort Red Border." Publishers Weekly, 20 July 2009, p. 125. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A204319141/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23389e73. Accessed 21 Feb. 2018.

• Muzzle
  https://www.muzzlemagazine.com/kiki-petrosino-review.html
  Word count: 1360

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Propulsive and hypnotic, the collection forges music out of desperation and revelation, creating a language that is both playful and menacing.” “astonishing.”
  Hymn for the Black Terrific by Kiki Petrosino
  Reviewed by Kendra DeColo, Book Review Editor

  Sarabande, 2013

  Kiki Petrosino’s astonishing second poetry collection, Hymn for the Black Terrific, reminds me of the Kafka quote, “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” The speaker of these startling and brilliantly-crafted poems possesses the violent wisdom of one who has awakened (whether through trauma or choosing to see clearly) and can no longer return to who they once were. This voice burns and blossoms through the collection, lit with the volatility of unrequited desire and hunger, while retaining a tenacious and indestructible consciousness. Propulsive and hypnotic, the collection forges music out of desperation and revelation, creating a language that is both playful and menacing.

  Set in three distinct, autonomous sections, the structure of Hymn is straightforward and authoritative— a contrast to the wild and propulsive unspooling of imagery and syntax. The first section “Oiseau Rebelle” takes its name from the Carmen aria, “Love is a Rebellious Bird.” Like the aria, which is marked by repeated musical phrases and mirrors the fickleness of love, the tone is obsessional as words reappear as holy objects, charms, and artifacts. For example, in the prose poem “Allergenesis,” Petrosino creates the feeling of being overwhelmed by the onslaught of allergens while admiring the beauty of their names:

  They come hot & star-limbed & buzzing, with their wire bones, with their names turning edgewise
  in the mouth. Bloodweed, Chestbane, the names. Knifeclock, Mulehook, the names. They come lifting
  themselves long as sentences in air, spiraling down the rifled barrel of the windpipe. (7)

  ​This poem seems to mirror the experience of reading Petrosino’s work— to be inundated with language that pleases and terrifies, such as in the poem “At the Teahouse” where the speaker’s voice becomes larger-than-life through sequences of gorgeous and hyperbolic imagery:

  Look at my flat gold feet chattering over mucky stacks
  of tiles. No one yells at me in the light. Once upon a time
  I had enough anger in me to crack crystal. I boiled up from bed
  in my enormous nightdress, with my lungs full of burning
  chrysanthemums. Now just imagine the color of the sky
  in my braincase. I’m drinking tea with diamonds in it. (21)

  There is a voluptuous abundance to these lines, driven by surrealism and precision. Rather than concrete meaning, what comes across is the hot blood of desire cupped with intellect— a disembodied voice in search of a vessel, context, and history.

  “Cygnus Cygnus,” an ars poetica dedicated to Dean Young, seems to interrogate the need to see the world as it is while leaning into mystery and astonishment:

  The sound of a swan is no chemical thing, but a bloody hum
  thick with rivalry & blue weather. It’s rage that moves

  the tongue of a swan in strange meters, it is only rage
  that pulls the tarsometatarsus back to the joint, like
  a bowstring stretched to the edge

  of its hungry self. Just so, you taught me to be warlike
  in my songs & still to praise the palm-sized stars
  brooding over their great darkness. (23)

  The poem cleaves to mythological and surreal imagery while inducing tenderness and intimacy. Petrosino’s diction, as in the rest of the collection, accrues into a clutter that could potentially overwhelm and obscure meaning but instead creates a music that amplifies emotion.

  Nowhere is repetition and obsession crafted more brilliantly in the collection than in the second section, “Mulattress.” Set in ten parts, each poem is a golden shovel, sharing a repeated line from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. The sequence reclaims and reconfigures Jefferson’s racist language with stunning lines such as:

  ​If you could become a very strong
  horizon made crisp with towers &
  huge stones, would you slip your disagreeable
  knot of flesh, then, O apple of dark, O door?(27)

  and

  Like the kidney-
  shaped sadness I carry in my head, & more
  brightening than ever. You can read by the glands of the skin
  how she knitted me. I lover her hands, which
  lift into sudden lakes. (28)

  Each poem is a reckoning with the past and the speaker’s identity, self-aware as the speaker interrogates her origin.

  Nearly every line in this section is worth quoting— “Sometimes I catch my mother in a handful of mint, its odor fresh as stars”— possessing a cerebral sensuality and gothic, dreamy realism. While the lyricism is enough to swoon over, the sequence itself is a formal feat, echoing elements of the ghazal, sestina, and crown of sonnets. By the time we arrive at the final poem, Jefferson’s line has almost been obliterated, diminished to a ghost, a faint scar or seam. What’s left is the speaker’s questions, her blessings, and the impossibility of reconciling history.

  This theme of internalizing language reappears in the third section “The Eaters,” a sequence of prose poems titled after (or inspired by) the names of dishes served to the poet during a trip to China. The fact that the titles are actual menu items lends whimsy and delight to the poems. Who wouldn’t want to imagine eating a dish called “I Love You, No Discussion,” or “Moon-Wrapped Fragrant Spareribs”? Yet there is an underlying heaviness and danger— partly from the dissociation implicit in calling the speaker “the eater.” The body is dismantled and exposed through obsessive description: “If she could fang her own hide open, she’s do it shred by shred. First the film around her mouth would split & draw away from chin & neck, down breasts grown thin & webby in the light” (49) and “Her teeth make mirrors of the sea” (51). The speaker’s voice is omniscient and clinically removed, making the dissection more troubling.

  The sequence is propelled by the repeated question: who is the eater? Painted as an enigma, the eater is given flesh and context through obscure, richly tactile clues: “Happy is that eater who rules by the cyclone of her face. By the syrup of her eye shall she drown the clanging earth” (51). She is mythological, elevated with visceral, textured description and imbued with a kind of dark magic: “Her claws push hard at scattered bits of gravel & snapped feathers. They say the world was full of eaters, once: heavy as sea glass, slow as blood” (47). The effect is both disorienting while pointing to a hidden narrative— the eater is the poet who is lonely and experiences the world while numbing herself to it, though compulsive eating.

  While each poem pulses with vibrant diction and imagery, the collection itself felt orderly and quiet— an effective but sometimes dampening organizing principle. Each section is narratively and formally homogenous to the extent that they could be read as individual chapbooks or a long sequenced poem. While this provides a structural stability that might support the reader through difficult or challenging terrain, I finished the collection wondering what opportunities might have been sacrificed for this orderliness. Or rather, I felt that my reading experience had been so thoroughly plotted that I didn’t have room to lose myself in the book. However, this shows only my own partiality to a certain kind of mystery or duende in contemporary collections, which Petrosino instead cultivates at the sentence-level. And perhaps the cumulative effect of her language is best contained within these sections, like a series of rich arias separated by silence. Ultimately, the richness of language is enough to be sated, asking us to be like the eater who, “…tastes her own blood & understands the word abundance for the first time” (40).

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2013/07/hymn-for-the-black-terrific-by-kiki-petrosino/
  Word count: 1191

  Quoted in Sidelights: “stimulates both mind and ear with its impressive, lexical reach,” related Julie Marie Wade, writing online at Rumpus. Petrosino, she added, “hears the music in our language and makes every word sing.” Wade described the collection as “a postmodern hymn” that “forms a gestalt in which forty-one lyrical and enigmatic cantos culminate in a provocative canticle that surpasses the sum of its parts.”
  Hymn for the Black Terrific by Kiki Petrosino
  Reviewed By Julie Marie Wade
  July 24th, 2013

  Q: What do the words nacelles, scrimshaw, and crenellated have in common? How about billet, perianth, and heliodor?
  A: They all make surprising appearances in Hymn for the Black Terrific, a collection that stimulates both mind and ear with its impressive, lexical reach. For instance, “If you were scrimshaw, & this the Arctic loop with miles to climb.” For instance, “Mark that each of your hands is a perianth of light.” Petrosino hears the music in our language and makes every word sing.
  Q: Is there a representative poem in this collection, one that epitomizes the poet’s singular voice?
  A: Petrosino has composed a postmodern hymn, and while it is distinctive in sound and quality (her poems are strikingly non-derivative), there is in fact a chorus of voices here. No single poem, no single voice within a poem, captures sufficiently her complex score. The collection forms a gestalt in which forty-one lyrical and enigmatic cantos culminate in a provocative canticle that surpasses the sum of its parts.
  In “Personal Style Monologue,” the speaker-singer playfully enumerates the dichotomies of our time. This is a ditty for our zeitgeist, a gusty diagnostic of the culture at large and in motion.
  The doctor is in. Martinis are out….
  Bacon is in. Sparkles are in.
  Elbows are in. Wasp waists are in….
  Time travel is in. Going out is out.
  To be in is out. To be out is still out.
  Blondes are in. Blades are in.
  Vampires are in. Gullets are out.
  In “Nocturne,” her song turns tender, melancholic, a hot kernel of narrative burning at the heart of the poem:
  Last night, the one I loved
  before you went before me, walking
  with his bride.
  I followed with my broken
  feet & coat unlatched. He called
  her cake & coin & wing
  & told her of a place so high
  the pines grow small
  as thumbs.
  In “Moon-Wrapped Fragrant Spareribs,” the anthem morphs into parable, set outside of time, replete with image-wisdom and oracular commands:
  Happy is that eater who rules by the cyclone of her face. By the syrup of her eye shall she drown the clanging earth. […] Therefore, lament neither the appetite that dismasts your cities, nor the emerald in her gut that spins. I tell you, the eater is more terrible than all your needlework of lemongrass, purer than aluminum the eater’s hum at eventide.
  Q: A hymn is typically written in honor of something. What is “the black terrific”? What else does Petrosino praise in this volume?
  A: The phrase “the black terrific” refers to a description of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick. In the title poem, this allusion immediately breaks down and spreads out, like a vial of mercury cracked. “With this spell, I conjure you,” the speaker-singer begins. This you, this black terrific, is by turns “magic swamp,” “secret smoke,” “kayak-shape,” and “key.” It is a shape-shifter, a riddle, a fascination. She inquires, “Are you my son? Are you my smallest rib?” She proclaims, “You’re dear to me as sleep or fire.”
  In this title poem, the word “dark” appears five times. In the collection overall, the word “dark” appears thirty-six times. Twenty-three of the forty-one poems reference “dark” or “darkness” explicitly. This black terrific is another form of dark, a metonym for many kinds of darkness. The dark is a hinge on which these poems swivel, open and close. It is also the doorstop by which each poem remains enticingly ajar.
  Petrosino writes a fraught paean to the dark—that small word with a squall inside it. In the invocation, her speaker-singer concludes the list of binary oppositions (in/out) with a declaration that breaks this pattern boldly. The dark is not part of the binary dark or light. It is neither in nor out. Rather, “The dark is here,” present, immediate, pervasive. She sings of a “dark hatchway,” of “dark decks,” of “radial engines of dark,” and of the “treedark.” Several times she sings of the “Beloved Dark.” Yet this same dark perplexes: “what/does it mean to bite down in the dark?” It becomes a “tuneless dark.” She must carry the dark the way a singer carries a tune—something for which she is responsible and also protective. The dark is sometimes the problem (“I/ felt the earth a dark/cut on my gums”), sometimes the solution (“O apple of dark, O Door”). But in the end, the dark is inevitable, ubiquitous, amoral. In the end, the speaker-singer resolves, “I bless this dark, which/carries on for miles.”
  Q: How does the poet make sense of her vocation? Does she grapple with this vocation in her poems?
  In “Cygnus Cygnus,” the speaker-singer begins, “To love a theory leaves no room for imprecision.” It is an arresting assertion. A poem, of course, is not a theory. It is the opposite of theory. A poem is all praxis, language mobilized in the making of art. Then, “I see how art is. It’s a fine blast furnace, & my knuckles/ make an imperfect pomegranate-delivery system.” A theory operates in abstractions. A poem, a work of art, thrives in rendering what is concrete, real. Here I feel the heat of the furnace, the hard rind of the pomegranate against the vulnerable knucklebone. The poem engages all my senses.

  “It’s tempting to lie to the young,” the speaker-singer continues, but poems are not in the business of covering up the truth; they are in the business of exposing it in order to explore it, even when the truth is a raw and bewildering thing. For instance, “Everyone I’ve loved is balanced/ on the edge of my chopstick.” For instance, “Once upon a time/ I had enough anger in me to crack crystal.”
  In Petrosino’s arias and dirges, the truth is almost always a raw and bewildering thing. That is no reason not to sing it: “To be a poet is to surface plainly/ from the wound of sleep. To observe how thickly feathered/ the heart, how small & bright the planet of human thought.” Even the theories. Especially the theories.
  “Just so,” she tells of her teacher, “you taught me to be warlike/ in my songs & still to praise the palm-sized stars/ brooding over their clutches of great darkness.” We hear the evidence of this nuanced knowing, fighting, and praising in all of Petrosino’s songs. We marvel at how well this student sings such unteachable things.

• Meridian
  http://www.readmeridian.org/review-witch-wife-by-kiki-petrosino/
  Word count: 1112

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Through stunning use of repetitive form and language that ranges from ordinary to electrically strange, Petrosino shows both the mind and body at work and the fraught relations between the two,” reported Anna Tomlinson on the Meridian Web site. The poet ponders “how to continually cultivate a whole self not just individually but in the face of racism and misogyny,” Tomlinson continued, adding: “Witch Wife’s magic is that it creates a world in its pages—one that believably co-exists with our mundane world, but that carries the possibility of a life in more dimensions.”
  Review: Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino
  February 1, 2018 in Reviews • 0 Comments

  Little gal, who knit thee?
  Dost thou know who knit thee?
  In “Self-Portrait,” the first poem of Kiki Petrosino’s third poetry collection, Witch Wife, the speaker introduces themes of origins and girlhood in the charming and danger-tinged language of fairy tale. The poem continues: “Gave thee milk & bid thee beg / Slid a purse between your legs.” This beginning frames a book that takes on the experience of living in the female body, the black body, the potentially childbearing body, the body in relation to family, lovers, country, and the natural world. As in this image of someone undertaking doll-like construction of a girl, the body is often made strange to the self in this collection. It is both thing and home, to be both managed and inhabited. It is something possessed by the self as well as a story written by others.
  The world of the collection slips between everyday and surreal, from plastic candy canes to words marching off pages. Metaphor and simile animate: exes rise up from their Mazdas, and the body has rooms, rugs and nooks. Skin is bright as automotive paint; July is an alkaloid tongue. We move from poems that inhabit our specific, thing-filled moment—Whole 30, Sting concerts, nutritional yeast—to poems that open the door to a dark, glowing dreamscape.

  One such poem is “Little Gals,” in which small creatures on “membranous wings” swarm the speaker as she stands “a soft deer / browsing the woods.” One tells her “You know / it’s past time you bred / & opens her mouth / full of egg teeth.” The speaker runs from them, but they follow, and:

  There is
  a red delight
  in the heat & snap
  of their pincers […]
  new mouthparts
  new bodies burrowing […]
  where I let them dig down
  into the dim
  places.

  This elemental image of fertility and the body overtaken recurs in the different ways in the collection.
  Through stunning use of repetitive form and language that ranges from ordinary to electrically strange, Petrosino shows both the mind and body at work and the fraught relations between the two. After “Little Gals,” in which the body feels primal and at the will of greater powers, and “Pastoral,” which ends with “You drink the drinks & bleed. You’re foam,” the collection shifts back to the cerebral. “Nocturne” shows a mind asserting control over being again: “What good am I doing?… / I take my pills. I bury watermelon seeds… / I fill myself with my regrets & begin to speak.” The tension of control pulls back and forth throughout the collection, mirroring the push and pull of Petrosino’s engagement with traditional forms.
  Witch Wife contains a whopping eighteen villanelles, mostly unrhymed and sometimes altered, as well as prose poems, a sestina, a ghazal, and a pantoum. Rather than final or enclosed, the repetition here feels wild, infinite, becoming. The question of how to live in this body seems impossible to answer. Circular form lends a feeling of the inability to stop or to settle on anything, and highlights the attempt but inability to control our selves.
  These villanelles often emphasize how nothing is ever finished or neatly packed away. In “Europe,” specific memories are past tense (“It was summer. I stood in my smithereens”), as is one of the repeating lines (“I wept in my clothes on the street”). The present tense of the other repeating line, “Every night, I go back to your house,” then, creates the drama of bringing, repeatedly, this era and person to the present, in an inescapable loop. The poem ends:

  I’ll never be so lonely again, or young enough
  to weep in my clothes on the street.
  Every night, I go back to your house.

  Negating the two previous lines, the final line addresses the paradox of how we are both always and never again our former selves, and how people we love continue to live with us in absence.
  Similarly, in “Gräpple,” a villanelle about the decision not to have a baby, the speaker continually undercuts what she’s stated before. She decides: “no starburst of cells / to haunt my fond flesh, round as a pomme.” But then: “But it’s hard to promise. / Something still / considers me.” The poem ends with a beginning: “It goes wrong. I start to plan.” These continual shifts become hypnotic, inviting us in to a profound ambivalence that isn’t often shown.
  The impossible questions of the collection are not just a matter of an unsettled mind: though the poems are more personal than socially-minded, the book contains the underlying issue of how society has created this in-betweenness with its conceptions of the female body and the black body. In “Thigh Gap,” Petrosino writes:

  I used
  to think: OK! A clean sharp place
  to keep. Or: I’ll grow
  a thing! to keep, for me But
  no […]

  In “New South,” the speaker is born “light girl, light girl / each step blessed but slant.” The poem ends with increasingly short and fragmented lines:

  I look down hard
  at my hands
  white webs opening
  somehow
  strange to
  myself.

  The question, then, becomes how to continually cultivate a whole self not just individually but in the face of racism and misogyny.
  Witch Wife’s magic is that it creates a world in its pages—one that believably co-exists with our mundane world, but that carries the possibility of a life in more dimensions. Here the fears that linger below the surfaces of our lives bloom into colorful, glittering places we can enter. In seeing these fears and horrors in full bloom, we can live with them a little better.
  Anna Tomlinson is a Poe/Faulkner Fellow in poetry in the MFA Program at the University of Virginia

• The East Bay Review
  http://theeastbayreview.com/review-witch-wife-by-kiki-petrosino/
  Word count: 910

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Witch Wife asks, can one be both a witch and a wife? In other words, is it possible to preserve deep wildness, what in us is most inexplicable and essential, while choosing to inhabit the quotidian confines of domesticity? Petrosino doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but she does ask unceasingly interesting questions.”
  Review: Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino
  December 31, 2017
  featured-reviews, Review
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  Witch Wife
  by Kiki Petrosino
  Published 2017 by Sarabande Books
  $16.95 hardcover ISBN 978-1946448033
  By Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
  Witch Wife gets power and momentum from a few sources, the most striking of which is repetition. Echoing (and even explicitly referencing) Anne Sexton, phrases (sometimes whole lines) reappear, and upon each usage, deepen, expand, and echo outwards, enlarging the space within each poem while drilling deeper toward its core. It’s more than form, though there’s plenty of that; these poems unfold like incantatory, irresistible spells.
  Voice is another huge driver here, and the speaker is full of contradictions—prickly and tender, intelligent and childish, cruel and guileless—that keep the reader perpetually unsettled and engaged. The voice is also intimate, using short, simple words and a nursery-rhyme cadence that balances the poems’ lyric intensity as acid does salt, resulting in something more delicious than either element alone.
  The book is split into four numbered sections, the poems in each loosely correlating to a phase in the speaker’s life. And the tension of domesticity (wife) vs. wildness (witch) is carried through each section, though it manifests in different ways. The first two sections take us through childhood, and subsequently, a young adulthood of travel, sexuality, and heartbreak. Especially in the first section, the speaker expresses a real disgust toward the physical self that’s recognizable to any woman/femme who’s grown up in this world where their body is considered an unfixable problem, and their desire a hushed mystery. It’s especially biting in poems like “Young” where the speaker refers to her “runny custard body / with its buried corkscrew of hate.”
  Early in the book, the speaker also reflects on lineage and how she has been shaped by the women who came before her, as evidenced in “New South”:
  I’m always marching
  my hair cropped close
  my mothers beside me
  in robes & crowns so
  I go back, go forth
  light girl, light girl
  crammed with light
  The self is subsequently cast into the world, with all the complications that entails. There’s also a purposeful, sincere messiness that mimics the inevitable collisions between the speaker and others in poems like “Europe”: “My age / is a seed-pearl under my tongue. Was I wrong / to weep in my clothes on the street?” The contrast between the imagined and the real, the wildly lyrical and quotidian in these lines generates a deeply bewildered feeling that mimics the emotional terrain of young adulthood.
  The book’s concerns then transition into those of adulthood, with the attendant realities of living as a black woman in America, as in “Letter to Monticello”: “Every month brought / me closer to Mars, a planet ruled by black women astronauts.” There’s also the splendid “Political Poem,” which uses Martin Luther King’s words as its refrain:
  Now the moral
  autobus kneels like a camel at the curb. It bends
  & I climb into the sinking dark. I climb. It bends.
  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
  Let it curl up like the moral
  fortune still inside the cookie, the moral
  border dissolving in cold milk.
  The cyclical emphasis placed on this quoted phrase reflects how civil rights struggles are ongoing, repetitive, and oftentimes frustrating, leaving each generation to go back over the same ground, using their limited energy bending the same arc.
  Witch Wife reveals growing anxiety around family and motherhood, which begins with “Little Gals,” (“One says You know / it’s past time you bred / & opens her mouth / full of egg teeth.”) and continues with “Vigil” (“I glimpse a momentary face, a tiny zero snugged within / my elbow’s dark”). We see a familiar tension of simultaneously wanting and not wanting children in poems like “Nursery”: “They had no faces yet. We spoke / into their quince-bud ears.” This is complicated by the external voices the speaker is exposed to in poems like “Prophecy”: “I can see you / at thirty weeks, your skin bright as automotive paint.” By the end of the book, a détente has been reached, as articulated in “Confession”: “Every month I decide not to try / is a lungful of gold I can keep for myself.” It’s not a harmonious resolution, but an awareness of how society places women in an impossible bind when it comes to choices around making (or not making) family.
  Witch Wife asks, can one be both a witch and a wife? In other words, is it possible to preserve deep wildness, what in us is most inexplicable and essential, while choosing to inhabit the quotidian confines of domesticity? Petrosino doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but she does ask unceasingly interesting questions. And, by giving attention to the questions that occupy her speaker, she elevates and illuminates them, holds them up to the light like precious stones and lets their facets cast an astonishing lyrical light.

• Post No Ills
  http://www.postnoills.com/main/?p=122
  Word count: 1735

  Quoted in Sidelights: “The book welcomes readers into the imagined world of the first section, and goes on to intrigue and excite with the permutations in the sections that follow. Ultimately, it is Petrosino’s fresh and innovative language use that makes for a first book of poems that sets her apart.”
  Imagined Architecture: A Review of Kiki Petrosino’s FORT RED BORDER
  Published in July 18th, 2010
  Posted by editor in Literature Reviews, Poetry, Uncategorized

  [View title on Goodreads.com]
  Petrosino, Kiki. Fort Red Border. Louisville: Sarabande Books, 2009. 88 pp. $14.95 (paper).
  Reviewed by DéLana Dameron
  From her statement in the collection’s acknowledgments, Kiki Petrosino wants to make clear that her poems in Fort Red Border “describe things that are entirely imaginary [and] do not describe [...] actual persons” (Petrosino, x). In making this claim, Petrosino attempts to create a greater separation between the speaker’s voice and that of the author, despite any assumed similarities. This distance is echoed by the book’s epigraph that quotes Brigit Pegeen Kelly who writes, “a thing like me, / but not the thing I asked for, a thing by accident or / design, I am now attached to.” This epigraph seems to be set in place to dispel readers’ impulses to assume that the “I” in the poems that follow this introduction is not a dramatic “I” but the speaker herself. One must also consider the “thing” Kelly refers to—that Petrosino adopts as her door into her collection—to be both the author’s body and maybe life. The body given is a “thing like [Petrosino], / but not the thing [she] asked for.” Fort Red Border explores the idea of inheritance, what we do with what we’re given and how do we come to terms with the marriage of the two, even when they are potentially at odds.
  These poems seek not to be identity poems, but end up functioning as such: navigating the complexities of one who has traveled much, of one who is not always comfortable in her real or imagined skins, of one for whom perhaps the “[body] not asked for” is still the body that must move through the world.
  Fort Red Border is divided into three sections: “Fort Red Border,” “Otolaryngology” and “Valentine.” As a debut collection, it is difficult to imagine the book as a singular unit except that all three sections are bound into one volume. The first section begins by invoking a very narrative world, where the speaker of the poems remains the same and ruminates on a relationship with a male character. Poems in this opening section, such as “Canto Thirteen” deftly render the intimate moments of this imagined relationship:
  ___________________________________The sheets
  have dropped from the long snowfield of his body. As he reaches
  for his glasses on the nightstand, I feel the mattress
  give; a slight hollow of warmth opens just under
  my knees. Redford sits up & slides one arm
  around my waist: I relax into his bare
  shoulder. (8)
  The poems in this section show an interesting dynamic of a female speaker in a functioning relationship without mourning a loss. This is refreshing—to see poems in which a couple works through a situation, getting to know each other. This slow reveal is complimented by Petrosino’s timing—her pacing and line breaks. Even the first poem, “Wash,” that is almost fully end-stopped, deserves quoting as an exemplar of her timing with the line, her understanding of the muscularity of what a line can hold:
  He never uses the faucet to shampoo my afro—just an old clay jar.
  Redford fills the jar at the backyard pump.
  Then he leaves it in the sun to heat.
  So it’s only going to be so warm by the time it gets to me.
  That’s the point of doing things natural:
  You get what the sun dishes out, not what you customize.
  The sun is not a customizable thing. (3)
  What can be disappointing about this point of view—considering that much of poetry can be about mourning and rebuilding what is lost—is that this dynamic Petrosino establishes, this subject that she writes about with such clarity and verve, is fully imagined. One wonders if—despite Petrosino’s attempts to disconnect herself in the acknowledgements and epigraph, these are not actually the complete desires of the author imagined through a created speaker. That is not to say poems cannot be fully imagined and true at the same time, but one does enter into the collection questioning the sincerity of the narrator, despite the seemingly seamless world created.
  The second section of the book is a departure from the initial door through which one enters Fort Red Border. It feels like a sharp turn into difficult terrain, more than a veer left or right. In this section, Petrosino puts aside the narrative near-linear progression that defines the book’s first section and instead explores language itself, what narrative is built upon. Petrosino converts the line from a place to explore a story to a kind of holding shelf that displays interesting word choices where each utterance by itself bears a unique weight, but, held together in the mouth or in the ear, is rather cryptic in meaning—amounting to a type of poem that begs to be read again and again. Take for example “The Human tongue slows down to speak”:
  Silted slab, gone white with injury
  in decorated dark, in budding vault of mayflies
  blind & basking, lifts itself:
  Is it birch trees again, is it breakfast again
  No bowl of branches here, nor light to brood
  in shallow pellicles.
  The tongue inclines, a swim with char
  and pheasant grease.
  Opines:
  _____Mother was a sieve.
  _____Father wept.
  _____How will I speak, when all my bones
  _____are hewn from nets I ate
  _____the little birds all from?
  Now, the swollen deck of summer lolls.
  The tongue begins & can’t begin.
  To dock the dawn as it swamps the tonsils—
  To catch the blazing protists down.
  Such slur of mud in mouth.
  Such blackened clang & yards not ringing
  in such house.
  The tongue stills, lordly.
  White root in the vascular dark.
  White trumpet in the dark’s
  low tent. (30)
  It is not that poems such as these are not a pleasure to read. More specifically, they ask the reader to engage a different part of the brain—to read the poems out loud, to listen to the language’s musicality, to suspend one’s desire for immediate comprehension that may have occurred more readily in the first section. There are elements that Petrosino carries throughout the section to create some continuity and keep the reader afloat: the one-word titles serve as islands to land before immersion into the ocean of language again. In just examining the titles alone (“White” and “Afro” or “Saints”; “Crusaders” and maybe “O Lord”) one can see how they lend themselves to thematic groupings that serve as signposts when returning to the sections and individual poems, to help the reader to piece together meaning beyond the pleasure of sound and music of language.
  If Petrosino was consciously calling these separate worlds to converge—like the unnamed speaker (presumably of African descent, identified as such by the several references to her “afro”) being in a relationship with Robert Redford, or like the vastly different aesthetics of the first and second sections—the third section of Fort Red Border is more of a hybrid. Aesthetically it is some offspring or marrying of the two schools of poetry presented before—the narrative and the language/musical. The minimal-level of security her one-word titles offered as signposts or landing strips in the second section become the prototype for titling each poem in the third section but with each poem sharing the same title. As a reader, one has to consider each iteration to be a variation on the “Valentine.” Unlike the speaker in the opening poem who is defined only by the reflection offered by “Redford” when he speaks such lines as, “Were you this soulful as a child,” or the speaker who is hard to pin down or identify as the same in each of the poems of the second section, the third section offers an almost fully-realized self. Here the reader enters with Petrosino into a more playful realm, a realm that may only have been entered after having traveled through the first two sections in order to see what has come of their amalgamation. In this section, the reader can align herself or himself with a speaker who is confident, and willing to claim her own desires. Unlike the speakers earlier in the book who represent two caricatures of sorts (the narrative speaker and the non-narrative speaker), this speaker successfully uses both story-telling and lyrical play in poems such as the eighth “Valentine” of this final section:
  I build you from a crust of glass.
  I build you.
  From frost, from cinnamon
  I build you.
  From the wood of the pear tree
  From horses on the covered bridge
  From fennel soap & thyme
  I build you.
  I build you from glades.
  I build you from scree.
  I build you from soft shells of light.
  I build you from the twelve
  Stoneflies I captured in a foil drinking cone.
  From the Gunpowder River I build you.
  From willow trees, from canoes filled with snow.
  From the crown of trees, from the rag and crown of trees
  I build you. (74)
  Like the speaker in this “Valentine,” Petrosino can be best described as an architect or designer throughout Fort Red Border. The book welcomes readers into the imagined world of the first section, and goes on to intrigue and excite with the permutations in the sections that follow. Ultimately, it is Petrosino’s fresh and innovative language use that makes for a first book of poems that sets her apart. Each word, each image, each narrative begs to be read aloud, to be taken apart and put back together.

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