Whenever I write about Mr. Jefferson, he gallopsover. Knock knock, he begins in quadruplicate. It’spretty wild, like my student’s poem about a houseof skin & hair, a house that bleeds. Mr. Jefferson’splace is so dear to me, white husk my heart beatsthrough, until I can’t write more. In my student’spoem, the house stands for womanhood, pain coiledin the drywall. Sorrow warps the planks, pulling nailsfrom ribs. In Kentucky, I’m the only black teachersome of my students have ever met, & that pulls mesomewhere. I think of Mr. Jefferson sending his fieldslaves to the ground, a phrase for how he made them pulltobacco & hominy from the earth, but also for howhe made of the earth an oubliette. At sixteen, they wentto the ground if Mr. Jefferson thought they couldn’t learnto make nails or spin. He forgot about them until theygrew into cash, or more land. For him, it must’ve seemedlike spinning. Sorrow of souls, forced to the groundas a way of marking off a plot. At sixteen, I couldn’tdescribe the route to my own home, couldn’t pilota vehicle, could hardly tell the hour on an analogclock. I had to wear my house-key on a red looparound my neck. Now, I rush to class beneath a bronzeConfederate, his dark obelisk, his silent mustache. My bookstumble past the lectern as I recite Mr. Jefferson’s litany: Swan.Loon. Nuthatch. Kingfisher. Electric web of names, yetin the ground, I know, a deeper weave of gone-away oneswho should mean more to me than any book. I live in languageon land they left. I have no language to describe this.
Farm Book
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- July 7, 2020
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Copyright © 2020 by Kiki Petrosino
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Kiki Petrosino is the author of four books of poetry: White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (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 on-line at Ploughshares. She 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.
Louisville, Kentucky
"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
“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
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