New Essay for the International Writing Program Collections

Last year, I was invited to participate in the "To What Do I Belong" symposium in Tangier, Morocco hosted by the University of Iowa's International Writing Program and the US State Department. I wrote an essay, "In the Rooms of Monticello," as my contribution to the proceedings. Now the piece has been collected by the IWP on a special website. You can read my work and the writings of the other delegates--from around the world--who participated in the adventure. 

As an American, I live in the shadow of Jefferson’s dream. I belong to its loveliness, and its terror. As a writer, I am trying to understand what this means.

As an American, I live in the shadow of Jefferson’s dream. I belong to its loveliness, and its terror. As a writer, I am trying to understand what this means.

Black Genealogy Reviewed in Cleaver Magazine

I'm very grateful for this detailed and thoughtful review by Claire Oleson of my chapbook, Black Genealogy, in the current issue of Cleaver Magazine.

"Negotiating with a history that was blind towards the humanity of Black people in America, Black Genealogy is a work of sight determined to bring the readers’ eyes, thoughts, and awareness up close with both immense presence and an effort…

"Negotiating with a history that was blind towards the humanity of Black people in America, Black Genealogy is a work of sight determined to bring the readers’ eyes, thoughts, and awareness up close with both immense presence and an effort to find and revive immense loss."

Witch Wife Reviewed in The Arkansas International

Witch Wife has received a wonderful capsule review in The Arkansas International.

"Like a water witch running a dowsing rod over the dirt, the poems of Kiki Petrosino’s third collection measure out the angles of the world’s curves, finding them in the speaker’s thigh gap, the fins of seahorses, or at Jantar Mantar, a gigantic Ind…

"Like a water witch running a dowsing rod over the dirt, the poems of Kiki Petrosino’s third collection measure out the angles of the world’s curves, finding them in the speaker’s thigh gap, the fins of seahorses, or at Jantar Mantar, a gigantic Indian sundial that “curves away into slices of egg.” In “Political Poem,” the speaker teases through various incantations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “arc of the moral universe,” through the “arc of green fireworks in spring” to the arc of her own spine until “bodies, berries, beaks, barns” are all collapsing toward justice.

Unfolding over four sections—each sprinkled with villanelles and other crackling formal quirks—Witch Wife deftly slides back and forth between the humorous and the devastating, between the guttural and the cosmic, between the conditions of America and the particularities of the speaker’s own body. The body is “runny custard . . . with its buried corkscrew of hate.” The body is “botched,” is prophesied to have “a good belly for twins.” Motherhood, for the speaker a subject of yearning, fear, and revulsion, is a tension at the collection’s heart. In “Ghosts,” one of many poems in this collection haunted by the ghost of Anne Sexton, mothers “wear the moonrise like lace.”

On top of it all, Witch Wife is tremendously, darkly funny. In the afterlife, the speaker’s exes “rise up from their Mazdas & adorn themselves in denim.” Certain to make many ‘best of’ lists for poetry this year, Witch Wife is not one to be missed."

New Poem in The Nation

A couple weeks ago, my poem, "A Guide to the Louisa County Free Negro and Slave Records, 1770-1865" was published in The Nation. Thanks to poetry editors Carmen Gimenez-Smith and Stephanie Burt for giving this one a home. This poem will be part of my next book, tentatively titled White Blood, and based on research into my deep roots in rural central and northern Virginia.