Synopses & Reviews
"Each of the book's three sections dramatizes how even in our high-flying fantasy lives, the ordinariness of the natural reasserts itself as a source of both limitation, and, paradoxically, extraordinary beauty."David Gorin, The Believer
A woman is a lordly thing. Hard as belts.
Mean as cat dirt in the dark. A woman rakes
her own self down to the girders. A little air
seeps in, a little smoke and buzz.
Some say I'm a woman. Some call me so.
No matter what I do, I just get handsomer.
Count my ribs. Now count my belts of fat.
Only one of us can get off. Guess who?
You talk, mild as mallow. I must've built you
from a kit. So fast your teeth fit the marks
in my head. Woman, woman you say.
Maybe I'm a sunfish, conjuring in the deep.
It takes more than blood to bring me down.
Watch me press my woman's tongue to your gullet.
You spit and jaw and call in the old meters til I'm sick
with sensing you. Open the door.
It's not love I want, but form. I'll roost here
in your headful of sunfish. You said: a woman craves
a devil for her darling. You lion claw. Come see
what I've digged with the teeth of my face.
Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande Books, 2009) and the co-editor of Transom, an independent online poetry journal. Poems have appeared in Tin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, and The New York Times. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at the University of Louisville.
Review
"Petrosino's second book after her well-received debut,
Fort Red Border, begins with a lyrical rush. . . . Petrosino is a rising young poet whose work libraries will want to own for readers looking for fresh talent."
--Library Journal
"Kiki Petrosinos new collection, Hymn For the Black Terrific, is the kind of book that makes readers of poetry ignite with joy and those who do not read poetry suddenly find themselves in love with verse. Petrosinos hymn is a song for the human, for the animal we are and for the starlight we are. Cold, self-conscious, ironic poetry is out. Petrosinos warm, intelligent, wild, blood and bone, poetry is in. Thank god for that."
--Matthew Dickman, Portland Oregon
Synopsis
Kiki Petrosinos sophomore effort far exceeds our expectations with wildly inventive lyrics on marriage, eating, and ancestors both dreamed and
Synopsis
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 ancestorsboth 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.
About the Author
Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009) and the co-editor of Transom, an independent online 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.