Kiki Petrosino

I'm trying to find words to describe this collection, and so far "lovely" and "ambivalent" come to mind. Petrosino uses repetition and startling images to describe her relationship to an (ever present) past. There's a sense of the author mediating between conflicting narratives, heritages, ways of understanding.

I wish I'd come to this book with a better knowledge of what I will term the Monticello-Industrial Complex, but certainly I've spent enough years living in the Upper South to get the gist. My favorite poems were "Happiness," which is beautiful and distressing and warrants a few rereads, and a series of villanelles titled "Message From the Free Smiths of Louisa County," which address gaps in the historical record. Petrosino reads these omissions as their own kind of resistance, but the resulting absences are nonetheless baffling and heartbreaking. Until reading these poems I'd never realized how much genealogy research feels like playing three-dimensional chess with dead people.… (more)