White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

by Kiki Petrosino

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946448545
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Kiki Petrosino is the author of four books of poetry: White Blood (2020); Witch Wife (2017); Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013); and Fort Red Border (2009)—all from Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, Tin House, and online at Ploughshares. Previously Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville, she now teaches at the University of Virginia as a Professor of Poetry. Petrosino is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Al Smith Fellowship Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. She lives in Charlottesville.

Read an Excerpt

Prelude

You’re on a train & your ancestors are in the Quiet Car.

The Quiet Car is locked with a password you can’t decrypt.

You’re a professional password decrypter, but your ancestors are demolition experts.

You’re wearing black tactical gear & your ancestors are wearing black tactical gear.

You’re dashing through each compartment, slamming doors open, while your ancestors lay small explosives.

As heat expands within the carriage, you escape through a picture window.

You climb to the top of the train & your ancestors rappel down the sides.

You’re rappelling down one side of the train when you glimpse your ancestors above you.

They leap from carriage to carriage as if weightless, as if drifting, as if curling tongues of snow.

You cling to the side of the train as each of your ancestors lifts away from you.

They float into the cloud of themselves.

In the rushing light, you perceive them as hundreds slow snake doctors.

O—

you begin.


"The Shop at Monticello"

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. I spend & spend in order to support this. I support this mountain

with my black money. Strange mountain in late bloom. Strange mansion built on mountains of wealth. I spend so much, I’m late for the tour

where I’m a blooming black dollar sign. I look good in the Dome Room prowling its high-gloss floor. It’s common to desire such flooring

for my own home, but owning a home is still strange. My blackness makes strange tools for a living, rakes the strangeness like dirt. I like to

rake my hands over merchandise: bayberry votives, English hyssop in crisp sachets. I like this Engraved Pewter Bookmark so much suddenly

I line up for it, clenching my upright fist. I pay cash to prove myself no shoplifter. Still, I abscond with my black feelings: crisp toast points

dunked in fig jam. On one hand, I must think very highly of myself to come here. Then again, that sounds like something I would say.

"Message from the Free Smiths of Louisa County"

We weren’t truly free until we read the Amendment ourselves all the way to Lincoln’s signature, dark vines

gathering over the page. A. Lincoln said we should go forth, leaving bondage forever but we weren’t truly free until

we signed our own names & read them back to ourselves. Our names, not our marks dark vines gathered at X. Lincoln’s signature

looked so calm, a brown river of stones worn smooth with patience. We had no time to catch up. We weren’t truly free until

we’d scaled the high turret of B or unlatched the strap where H buckles itself. Still, it took years to reach Lincoln’s signature, dark vines

gathering. Our jagged serifs serrated the pages we signed. We wrote out our wills. You write poems about Lincoln, dark little vines of until.
But we weren’t truly free. Read the amendment.

Table of Contents

Prelude 1

What Your Results Mean: Western Africa 28% 5

Happinefs 17

Albemarle 35

Instructions for Time Travel 57

Monticello House Tour 38

If You Tell Them Sally Hemings Was Three-Fourths White 39

La Cuisinière Bourgeoise 40

Essay in Architecture 41

Terrorem 42

The Virginia House-Wife 44

The Shop at Monticello 45

Souvenir 46

Farm Book 47

The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy 49

What Your Results Mean: Northwestern Europe 12% 51

Louisa 63

In Louisa 65

A Guide to the Louisa County Free Negro & Slave Records, 1770-1865 67

Message from the Free Smiths of Louisa County 68

Louisa County Patrol Claims, 1770-1863 69

The Origins of Butler Smith 70

Message from the Free Smiths of Louisa County 72

The Origins of Harriett Smith 73

Mrs. A. T. Goodwin's Letter to the Provost Marshal, 1866 75

The Estate of Butler Smith 77

Message from the Free Smiths of Louisa County 78

How It Feels to Love Butler Smith 79

Message from the Free Smiths of Louisa County 81

Heriac Tourism in Central Virginia 82

Approaching the Smith Family Graveyard 83

What Your Results Mean: North and East Africa 5% 85

Interlude 97

Psalm 99

Acknowledgments 101

Notes 105

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2021 UNT Rilke Prize
Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Nominee
Library of Virginia Literary Awards Finalist
San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award
Winner of the 2021 Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice
Featured in 2021 CLMP Indie Lit Fair, "Power to the People"
IPPY Awards, Silver Medal for "Poetry"
Official Selection of Virginia for Route 1 Reads
The New York Times, “Poems that Poets Turn to in a Time of Strife”
The New York Times Book Review, “New and Noteworthy”
Publishers Weekly "Spring 2020 Announcements, Top 10"
Library Journal, “Black Voices Matter 2020”
Publishers Weekly, “An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List”
Rumpus, “What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Women’s History”
The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: May 2020”
Library Journal, "Versifying / Collection Development: Poetry" 
Electric Literature, "7 Poetry Collections About the Complexities of Black Womanhood"
Poets.org, "National Poetry Month Books for 2020"
Southern Review of Books, “The Best Southern Books of May 2020”


"'I’m a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies / into money,' Petrosino writes in her fourth book, eyeing race, history, genetics and hope through the crucible of Virginia."
—The New York Times Book Review, print, “New and Noteworthy”

"This is an important and remarkable exploration of heritage."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The result of deep historical research, impressive formal dexterity, and savvy storytelling, this volume of poetry combines genealogy, history, and verse in a way that reflects many American experiences." 
—Foreword Reviews

"These poems candidly tackle questions of identity, historical injustice, and suffering while suggesting the possibility of greater understanding through scientific innovation."
—Publishers Weekly, “Spring 2020 Announcements”

"Another ambitious volume from Petrosino."
—The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: May 2020”

“Petrosino composes poems that burn and sizzle, that pierce the reader with their masterful crafting and heightened vulnerability; she breaks open and digs into bother her personal past, where she ‘grew like a braid / in bad light,’ as well as American society’s ‘throb-in-throat’ past.”
—Poets & Writers, “Between Worlds: A Q&A with Poet Kiki Petrosino”

"The collection has a searching, yearning momentum that is cut by the wry intellect of a speaker who knows her pursuit of historical meaning remains subject to the same colonial forces that influenced the lives of her ancestors."
—Harvard Review

"Petrosino showcases her mastery of form."
—The Arkansas International

"White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, is deeply personal, exploring the genealogy and legacy of her African-American ancestors in Virginia. At the same time, [Petrosino] grapples with the messy history of slavery and discrimination in America, and of the sometimes difficult, often abiding choices that families of every stripe have to make. It’s part of Petrosino’s unique ability as a poet to capture the expansive within the intimate, the ungainly within precise poetic forms."
—"Art Talk with NEA Literature Fellow Kiki Petrosino" by Rebecca Sutton, National Endowment for the Arts

"[T]he ever-popular Kiki Petrosino excavates her roots to understand the impact of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South."
—"Versifying / Collection Development: Poetry" by Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

"It would be folly to overlook Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia on a list of environmentally-focused books. I can’t read about the landscape of Virginia and the Upper South (which Petrosino vividly describes) and not think about the blood and sweat soaked into that soil. Petrosino’s exacting eye challenges reductive and redacted narratives of her native place. In this wondrously innovative collection, she renews understandings about what has grown up from that land."
—"Twelve Poetry Recommendations for Black History Month" by Camille T. Dungy, Orion Magazine

“Merg[es] fierce intelligence with sharp music.”
—Rhino, Review

"Petrosino erases stereotypes and misplaced certainty with the fractured and fragmented truths of what it means to live in the wake of ancestors who suffered and afflicted, who might be imagined to be redeemed or relieved or most certainly damned."
—"Building an Archive of Earth and Water: New Poetry That Excavates the Past to Imagine a Future" by Kathryn Nuernberger, West Branch

"There is such a lovely, clean precision to Petrosino’s lines."
—Rob McClennan, Periodicities

“Looking at the moment where we are in our nation’s history, we’re at this point of transformation — trying to take account and responsibility for our past and to remake our country. And we look at poets like Kiki to see how all of us can do that.”
— Lisa Roberts in "Iowa City Poetry launches ‘Two Voices’ interview series," The Daily Iowan

"Her collection exemplifies the power of prose to reckon with our past and understand our future."
—The Denton Record-Chronicle, online

“Kiki Petrosino has been perfecting a form of weaponized valentine, a love poem armed with play and appraisal, ever since her amazing debut. Her poems charm and fillet. In White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia home is filled with history and possibility, 'that twoness one ever feels' in place and body. Both singular lyric poem and mercurial sequence featuring epistles, erasures, and sonnets, this book is wonderfully irreducible. It’s further evidence of Kiki Petrosino’s limitless, inimitable talent.”
—Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin and Lighthead

“Fueled by what it means to identify your own blood, White Blood is a masterful book of poems that excavates, resurrects, and stares clear-eyed into history. Petrosino's intricate attention to sound and the muscularity of the poetic line make these poems explode in both the ear and the heart. Here is a poet at her best.”
—Ada Limón, author of The Carrying and Bright Dead Things

“In this meditation, Petrosino unlocks the history of Virginia and its racial intersections. White Blood is a magical collection, and Petrosino leads the reader through the geography of her origin with reverence. What does this body have to say of a Commonwealth never designed to include it? This voice has escaped alone to sing to us.”
—T.J. Jarrett, author of Zion and Ain’t No Grave

From the Publisher