Kiki Petrosino: 4 books

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...

At a literal crossroads in the South, there are two speakers in these poems — the descendant, who has traveled here to try to find her ancestors in the archives, records, and receipts of their violent and near-unrecorded history, and the ancestors, who are alternately bemused, angry, and tender...

The poems of Witch 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. In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history’s ghosts-the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft-and sings them to life.

“As with the best writing, I found myself simultaneously devastated and soothed, satiated and hungry for more.” --Susanna Childress, author of Entering the House of Awe TANKA & ME is a visceral, pleading, and fierce collection of poems, underpinned with thudding vessels and satisfying...