White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

By Kiki Petrosino

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1946448540
• ISBN13: 9781946448545
• Release Date: May 2020
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.4"