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 of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009) and the co-editor of Transom, 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 in Tin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, and The New York Times. Petrosino teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.

My Seaborgium sings songs of loss and growth, motherhood and viscera, elements and experience, with love and relatable grace."e;I'll tell you the story,"e; the opening poem coos, "e;of how / I rolled around in a mail truck full of other / people's letters, I was that happy / to be your mother."e; This speaker guides us into her expectant waiting, calling on insight from what she knows of her parents, what she thought she knew about her body, fables and gods. She asks all of these potential sources of wisdom to attend to her as forty weeks go by and she tries to detach because "e;it makes birth manageable,"e; even as she tests her nipples "e;to see if they lift / away from the breast"e; while "e;standing on a mountain / and trying to spot a suitcase on the ground below."e; My Seaborgium travels toward motherhood from before, during, and after the experiences of pregnancy and birth, as the speaker imagines the thickening of her infant's fur and readies "e;for the bloody show."e; The only wisdom she gleans from her passage is the live and atomic feeling that arrives for a child whom she tells to "e;be your element's namesake / and alive, know it. My Seaborgium."e; This is a book fat with heavy and wild love.Named a 2015 Best New Poet, Alicia Rebecca Myers is multiply published in prominent journals and magazines and has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts residency."e;The poems of My Seaborgium utilize metaphor in an attempt to account for the beauty that emerges from our moments of greatest grief. . . . Even through the pain, Myers's speaker struggles to pay attention, to unfold that pain in ways that feel particular and personal."e;--Kiki Petrosino, author of Hymn for the Black Terrific

"e;Elegant and raunchy, tender and brutal, musically, visually, and erotically ravishing, Greg Allendorf's work is everything I want poetry to be, and I will read this volume again and again."e;-Aliki Barnstone, author of Bright BodyIt's April now, complains Allendorf's speaker, and still no desperate gift of unreturned yearning.The poems of Fair Day in An Ancient Town subvert the glorious, Romantic pastoral into a voice easy to imagine as Walt Whitman's darkly clever younger brother. The object of affection is fake-tanned and an idiot but still crashes a dozen lush masturbatory fantasies-or the speaker and his lover meet as shepherds only to eat M&Ms and abandon each other on bingo night. O, the way his mouth confounded me / and folded on my mouth there in the fold, slyly sings one of Allendorf's shepherd's songs, O, the glory of his hairy arms, / the way they lit my eyes a little then.Layering complex form, rhyme, and craft over lush horniness and hard wit, Allendorf effortlessly upends romantic poetry and exposes it to the twenty-first century. This is a collection to make the reader laugh out loud and think deep-and then find a way to be alone under the covers."e;With uncommon linguistic acuity [. . .] and a delightfully original voice, Greg Allendorf offers up poems that speak-and continue speaking-genuine longing, and the insistent ache of love. These are necessary poems for our young century."e;-Scott Cairns, author of Idiot Psalms

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 with their descendant. Petrosino's poems argue with each other across time and seek to hear each other over the guardians and soldiers of the past who want to keep black genealogy from the descendants who would sing its truth. Interchapters illustrated by artist Lauren Haldeman reimagine the barriers of genealogical research as an enigmatic Confederate soldier with the disquieting habits and obstructive magicks of Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat.Timely, groundbreaking, and powerful, Kiki Petrosino's Black Genealogy has the weight of an instant classic.

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.

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 turned black 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.

The highly anticipated, first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino.Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. “Bright,” a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author’s upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity.

Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. “Bright,” a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author’s upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity.

"e;We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary voice in these poems"e; -Roy G. Guzman, author of Restored Mural for Orlando A truly incomparable collection, The Rise of Genderqueer constructs a voice with unmitigated and authentic yearning. Its poems soak ink into page from margin to margin, pressing into the reader's assumptions about gender unmercifully. These poems demand, carry authentic wisdom, deliver keen argument, and disarm with sly wit. Wren Hanks challenges the status quo as neatly as a flower slid into the barrel of a rifle. These are utterly convincing prose forms studded with rhetoric he's deftly remastered and sampled from our culture and conversations right now. "e;I'll never be denatured, // I am nature,"e; Hanks's poems insist, as the reader bears witness to a bigger world, light flooding into every corner, revealing what has always been true, vigorous, and expansive.

"e;An anthem against apathy"e; -Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat Read Tracy Mishkin's poems as an antidote to the "e;meat wheel full of teeth"e; that is the contemporary news cycle. Not because this dangerously clever collection soothes, or because it provides comfort, but because these lyrics are urgent without shallow or callous bids for the reader's attention, and instead render the heartbreak of America as gorgeously as an old master's Vanitas-it's the beauty of the poems that provides hope, even as the menace of the grinning skull cannot. This Is Still Life fully invests in the double meaning of the title as it uses the dirty minutia of domestic life to symbolically stand in for our ruin while pointing to how the sunlight gilds the dirt so sweetly, we can't help but get up again in the morning. "e;Talk radio, speak / to my heart of all that I have lost,"e; Mishkin's speaker prays, and we find ourselves praying, too, while the poems work polish into our hope.

I realize that being a woman is a lot / like being a planet-I can't decide / what my gravity attracts. I am as helpless / as I am powerful. Poet Rita Feinstein builds a planet from twenty-five sonnets of lost love, and the astrophysics is undeniable. What has more gravitational pull than loss? What is a more alien landscape than the rearrangement of a heart? A strong narrative arc built from verse, Feinstein's debut collection crosses Shakespeare with science fiction to launch readers into a world apart where a newly broken heart is celebrated, examined, nurtured, and let to rage, as if only the atmosphere of an entirely new planet is able to bear the process of healing. This emotionally generous collection looks at pain and love-fourteen crystalline and confessional lines at a time. Dodge, as the speaker names her planet, "e;is not Virginia."e; It is "e;red because a horse heart / is red . . . Red because / that's what I was wearing when I left,"e; and as the speaker fills Planet Dodge with men (because "e;there's no reason for Dodge / to be this empty"e;), she finds "e;how easy it is to hate them all / after six years of loving you too much."e; Life on Dodge is a powerful cycle of confessional verse, a contemporary radio signal to Plath and Sexton, utterly unafraid of the heat and danger of reentry after the fully interstellar escape that comes after heartbreak. "e;Next month the pain will be less, / and the next month it will simply disappear. / For example: today you are coming to Dodge. / You are coming to take me home."e;

I am trying to tell my unborn daughter a story. It is an old storythat hangs on the spinneret tip of a spider's abdomen,the spider's heart a bruise,each chamber a stitch that nicks the copper bloodas it rushes through, each valve sighing outlike the hush that hunglodged in everyone's lungs,a silence stacked between plates on the drying rack,a thrum that vibrated the blades of his kitchen knives.With long-limbed free verse and highly textured prose, Calf Canyon builds an origin myth with uncertain consequences and bald violence. McCartt-Jackson imagines a landscape where memories are permeable, physical places: the watersides of rural Kentucky and the Ozarks give way to the dry gulches and deep ravines of California as the speaker attains adulthood and her relationships become more fraught with danger.So, this: / you didn't mean to / tear out the part of you you didn't like / by tearing out a part of me / for the sixth, seventh, eighth, twelfth time you decided: / love was my heart, / the size of your fist.Domestic meditations vine with the thorns of the natural world in a collection that is bare-handed, wind-polished, and visceral, and McCartt-Jackson's command of imagery leaves the reader with sculptural playback of brutal love and resonant feelings. This is a collection to read beginning to end, and from the end to the first poem, interleaving the pages with marginalia, tears, and the reader's own memories. Rarely does a poet bend such gifted, formal craft to the requirements of fierce feeling.

"Petrosino is a canny, wide-ranging and formally nimble writer with a magician's command of atmosphere."—The New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2017"Witch Wife is back in a brand new paperback edition, featuring a reader’s guide and writing prompts from the poet herself.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.

From award-winning author Kiki Petrosino comes a poignant exploration of identity, heritage and belonging for readers of Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral and Seamus Heaneys NorthThrough vivid imagery and spare, precise verse, Kiki Petrosinos Perfect Italian examines the complexities of cultural inheritance, the nuances of language, and the emotional weight of diasporic identity as a Black and Italian American. The collection weaves personal memories with ancestral echoes, reflecting on themes of family, grief, and the search for connection across generations and geographies. From the sensory experiences of travel in Italy to the tension of navigating dual identities, Petrosinos work captures the beauty and struggle of self-discovery. Her language creates a rich tapestry of emotions and landscapes, offering a profound meditation on the intersections of race, culture, and belonging.Perfect Italian is the third and final installment in Petrosinos series on heritage and identity. Previous books in the collection, also published by Sarabande, include White Blood(2020) and Bright (2022)

“Fort Red Border—the title itself an anagram for the name of this remarkable collection’s imaginary beloved—shows how language can be pleated, unfolded, and creased all over again into an endless origami of Eros. . . . By turns clowning, worshipful, heartbroken, and Faulknerian, these lyrics transport the reader to a familiar place made utterly strange.”—Srikanth ReddyKiki Petrosino has audacity to spare. She devotes the entire first section of her debut collection of poems to a putative affair the speaker is conducting with an imaginary Robert Redford. In the poems, Redford is solicitous of the speaker, as well as curious about her “difference,” probing her about the various meanings of “natural” when applied to her African-American hair. The poems’ hilarity and poignancy issue from the speaker’s distance from, and yearning toward, the center of mainstream culture. Redford serves as ideal partner, the embodiment of American masculinity––but there is also an odd tenderness and actuality to the relationship. In these poems Petrosino is fearless, proceeding from the recognizable terrain of daily life’s emotions rather than seeking refuge in the cool of mere obscurity. Petrosino’s poems scout a new path, one that discovers a believably fierce, vivid, feeling self.Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009) and Hymn For The Black Terrific (Sarabande, 2013), and the co-editor of Transom, 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 in Tin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, and The New York Times. Petrosino teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.

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 of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009) and the co-editor of Transom, 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 in Tin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, and The New York Times. Petrosino teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.

My Seaborgium sings songs of loss and growth, motherhood and viscera, elements and experience, with love and relatable grace."e;I'll tell you the story,"e; the opening poem coos, "e;of how / I rolled around in a mail truck full of other / people's letters, I was that happy / to be your mother."e; This speaker guides us into her expectant waiting, calling on insight from what she knows of her parents, what she thought she knew about her body, fables and gods. She asks all of these potential sources of wisdom to attend to her as forty weeks go by and she tries to detach because "e;it makes birth manageable,"e; even as she tests her nipples "e;to see if they lift / away from the breast"e; while "e;standing on a mountain / and trying to spot a suitcase on the ground below."e; My Seaborgium travels toward motherhood from before, during, and after the experiences of pregnancy and birth, as the speaker imagines the thickening of her infant's fur and readies "e;for the bloody show."e; The only wisdom she gleans from her passage is the live and atomic feeling that arrives for a child whom she tells to "e;be your element's namesake / and alive, know it. My Seaborgium."e; This is a book fat with heavy and wild love.Named a 2015 Best New Poet, Alicia Rebecca Myers is multiply published in prominent journals and magazines and has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts residency."e;The poems of My Seaborgium utilize metaphor in an attempt to account for the beauty that emerges from our moments of greatest grief. . . . Even through the pain, Myers's speaker struggles to pay attention, to unfold that pain in ways that feel particular and personal."e;--Kiki Petrosino, author of Hymn for the Black Terrific

"e;Elegant and raunchy, tender and brutal, musically, visually, and erotically ravishing, Greg Allendorf's work is everything I want poetry to be, and I will read this volume again and again."e;-Aliki Barnstone, author of Bright BodyIt's April now, complains Allendorf's speaker, and still no desperate gift of unreturned yearning.The poems of Fair Day in An Ancient Town subvert the glorious, Romantic pastoral into a voice easy to imagine as Walt Whitman's darkly clever younger brother. The object of affection is fake-tanned and an idiot but still crashes a dozen lush masturbatory fantasies-or the speaker and his lover meet as shepherds only to eat M&Ms and abandon each other on bingo night. O, the way his mouth confounded me / and folded on my mouth there in the fold, slyly sings one of Allendorf's shepherd's songs, O, the glory of his hairy arms, / the way they lit my eyes a little then.Layering complex form, rhyme, and craft over lush horniness and hard wit, Allendorf effortlessly upends romantic poetry and exposes it to the twenty-first century. This is a collection to make the reader laugh out loud and think deep-and then find a way to be alone under the covers."e;With uncommon linguistic acuity [. . .] and a delightfully original voice, Greg Allendorf offers up poems that speak-and continue speaking-genuine longing, and the insistent ache of love. These are necessary poems for our young century."e;-Scott Cairns, author of Idiot Psalms

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 with their descendant. Petrosino's poems argue with each other across time and seek to hear each other over the guardians and soldiers of the past who want to keep black genealogy from the descendants who would sing its truth. Interchapters illustrated by artist Lauren Haldeman reimagine the barriers of genealogical research as an enigmatic Confederate soldier with the disquieting habits and obstructive magicks of Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat.Timely, groundbreaking, and powerful, Kiki Petrosino's Black Genealogy has the weight of an instant classic.

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.

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 turned black 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.

The highly anticipated, first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino.Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. “Bright,” a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author’s upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity.

Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. “Bright,” a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author’s upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity.

"e;We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary voice in these poems"e; -Roy G. Guzman, author of Restored Mural for Orlando A truly incomparable collection, The Rise of Genderqueer constructs a voice with unmitigated and authentic yearning. Its poems soak ink into page from margin to margin, pressing into the reader's assumptions about gender unmercifully. These poems demand, carry authentic wisdom, deliver keen argument, and disarm with sly wit. Wren Hanks challenges the status quo as neatly as a flower slid into the barrel of a rifle. These are utterly convincing prose forms studded with rhetoric he's deftly remastered and sampled from our culture and conversations right now. "e;I'll never be denatured, // I am nature,"e; Hanks's poems insist, as the reader bears witness to a bigger world, light flooding into every corner, revealing what has always been true, vigorous, and expansive.

"e;An anthem against apathy"e; -Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat Read Tracy Mishkin's poems as an antidote to the "e;meat wheel full of teeth"e; that is the contemporary news cycle. Not because this dangerously clever collection soothes, or because it provides comfort, but because these lyrics are urgent without shallow or callous bids for the reader's attention, and instead render the heartbreak of America as gorgeously as an old master's Vanitas-it's the beauty of the poems that provides hope, even as the menace of the grinning skull cannot. This Is Still Life fully invests in the double meaning of the title as it uses the dirty minutia of domestic life to symbolically stand in for our ruin while pointing to how the sunlight gilds the dirt so sweetly, we can't help but get up again in the morning. "e;Talk radio, speak / to my heart of all that I have lost,"e; Mishkin's speaker prays, and we find ourselves praying, too, while the poems work polish into our hope.

I realize that being a woman is a lot / like being a planet-I can't decide / what my gravity attracts. I am as helpless / as I am powerful. Poet Rita Feinstein builds a planet from twenty-five sonnets of lost love, and the astrophysics is undeniable. What has more gravitational pull than loss? What is a more alien landscape than the rearrangement of a heart? A strong narrative arc built from verse, Feinstein's debut collection crosses Shakespeare with science fiction to launch readers into a world apart where a newly broken heart is celebrated, examined, nurtured, and let to rage, as if only the atmosphere of an entirely new planet is able to bear the process of healing. This emotionally generous collection looks at pain and love-fourteen crystalline and confessional lines at a time. Dodge, as the speaker names her planet, "e;is not Virginia."e; It is "e;red because a horse heart / is red . . . Red because / that's what I was wearing when I left,"e; and as the speaker fills Planet Dodge with men (because "e;there's no reason for Dodge / to be this empty"e;), she finds "e;how easy it is to hate them all / after six years of loving you too much."e; Life on Dodge is a powerful cycle of confessional verse, a contemporary radio signal to Plath and Sexton, utterly unafraid of the heat and danger of reentry after the fully interstellar escape that comes after heartbreak. "e;Next month the pain will be less, / and the next month it will simply disappear. / For example: today you are coming to Dodge. / You are coming to take me home."e;

I am trying to tell my unborn daughter a story. It is an old storythat hangs on the spinneret tip of a spider's abdomen,the spider's heart a bruise,each chamber a stitch that nicks the copper bloodas it rushes through, each valve sighing outlike the hush that hunglodged in everyone's lungs,a silence stacked between plates on the drying rack,a thrum that vibrated the blades of his kitchen knives.With long-limbed free verse and highly textured prose, Calf Canyon builds an origin myth with uncertain consequences and bald violence. McCartt-Jackson imagines a landscape where memories are permeable, physical places: the watersides of rural Kentucky and the Ozarks give way to the dry gulches and deep ravines of California as the speaker attains adulthood and her relationships become more fraught with danger.So, this: / you didn't mean to / tear out the part of you you didn't like / by tearing out a part of me / for the sixth, seventh, eighth, twelfth time you decided: / love was my heart, / the size of your fist.Domestic meditations vine with the thorns of the natural world in a collection that is bare-handed, wind-polished, and visceral, and McCartt-Jackson's command of imagery leaves the reader with sculptural playback of brutal love and resonant feelings. This is a collection to read beginning to end, and from the end to the first poem, interleaving the pages with marginalia, tears, and the reader's own memories. Rarely does a poet bend such gifted, formal craft to the requirements of fierce feeling.

"Petrosino is a canny, wide-ranging and formally nimble writer with a magician's command of atmosphere."—The New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2017"Witch Wife is back in a brand new paperback edition, featuring a reader’s guide and writing prompts from the poet herself.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.

From award-winning author Kiki Petrosino comes a poignant exploration of identity, heritage and belonging for readers of Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral and Seamus Heaneys NorthThrough vivid imagery and spare, precise verse, Kiki Petrosinos Perfect Italian examines the complexities of cultural inheritance, the nuances of language, and the emotional weight of diasporic identity as a Black and Italian American. The collection weaves personal memories with ancestral echoes, reflecting on themes of family, grief, and the search for connection across generations and geographies. From the sensory experiences of travel in Italy to the tension of navigating dual identities, Petrosinos work captures the beauty and struggle of self-discovery. Her language creates a rich tapestry of emotions and landscapes, offering a profound meditation on the intersections of race, culture, and belonging.Perfect Italian is the third and final installment in Petrosinos series on heritage and identity. Previous books in the collection, also published by Sarabande, include White Blood(2020) and Bright (2022)

“Fort Red Border—the title itself an anagram for the name of this remarkable collection’s imaginary beloved—shows how language can be pleated, unfolded, and creased all over again into an endless origami of Eros. . . . By turns clowning, worshipful, heartbroken, and Faulknerian, these lyrics transport the reader to a familiar place made utterly strange.”—Srikanth ReddyKiki Petrosino has audacity to spare. She devotes the entire first section of her debut collection of poems to a putative affair the speaker is conducting with an imaginary Robert Redford. In the poems, Redford is solicitous of the speaker, as well as curious about her “difference,” probing her about the various meanings of “natural” when applied to her African-American hair. The poems’ hilarity and poignancy issue from the speaker’s distance from, and yearning toward, the center of mainstream culture. Redford serves as ideal partner, the embodiment of American masculinity––but there is also an odd tenderness and actuality to the relationship. In these poems Petrosino is fearless, proceeding from the recognizable terrain of daily life’s emotions rather than seeking refuge in the cool of mere obscurity. Petrosino’s poems scout a new path, one that discovers a believably fierce, vivid, feeling self.Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009) and Hymn For The Black Terrific (Sarabande, 2013), and the co-editor of Transom, 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 in Tin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, and The New York Times. Petrosino teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.