#kiki petrosino

[havingapoemwithyou]

witch wife by Kiki Petrosino

[some-spinner-in-june]

on pacifist nurturer witch blue

in which i overanalyze my favorite stick figure lol <3

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credits:

maggie nelson || animator vs. animation 4 || @/soracities || @tallsc || the good place (2016) || tv tropes || mercy, rudy francisco || dogfish, mary oliver || @becker-call || the piglin war - animation vs. minecraft shorts ep 20 || @becker-call || what my bones know: a memoir of healing from complex trauma, stephanie foo || the showdown - animation vs. animation 8 || asofterworld, #1237 || peach yogurt, frank o'hara || perhaps the world ends here, joy harjo || the chef - animation vs. minecraft shorts ep 32 || sam sifton || @whirld-of-color || potions - animation vs. minecraft shorts ep. 4 || red ocher, jessica poll || a short history of nearly everything, bill bryson || @inksandpensblog || a new witch - an actual short || the hocus-pocus of the universe, laura gilpin || witch wife, kiki petrosino || the king - animation vs. minecraft shorts ep 30 || lapis lazuli, the oh hellos

[astaticworld]

kiki petrosino/house of the dragon/erik kain

[tarotphil]

hey robin i just took your totally normal dnp uquiz and i need you to drop your poetry recs cuz what in the hell?? does choices killed me!!!

- @astrophilip

may!! hi, tysm :)) totally normal uquiz for normal people. I can ABSOLUTELY drop some poetry recs

Mary Oliver is my favourite forever and ever. the “new and selected poems” collection is very good, it has one about her dog that makes me want to weep. (It’s called Her Grave if you’re interested)

Marie Howe to me is like. The peak of a “conversational” poet. What The Living Do changed my brain chemistry

Margaret Atwood is an absolute powerhouse of a woman. some highlights of my favourites from her, I Was Reading A Scientific Article, variations on the word sleep, variations on the word love, and ofc A Boat

Sav Brown!!! I can probably credit her with getting me into poetry. both her poetry collections, Sweet Dark (<3333) and closer baby closer have been made available for free online. you can also see some of Sav’s stuff on YouTube

Rhiannon McGavin,,,, she’s never not hurt me. I’ve never got my hands on an actual collection by her, but here’s a good one I found floating on tumblr

Kiki Petrosino! I love her “Eater” poems, which I can’t find any links for, but if you can track them down, do give them a read!

this is Rudy Francisco doing a diabolical mashup of some of his love poems from Helium, an incredible collection in its own right

I used to do speech competitions in high school, and Shane Koyzcan is a goldmine for that. The Crickets Have Athritis is seared into my mind forever

[firstfullmoon]

Kiki Petrosino, “Witch Wife”

[bostonpoetryslam]

All of us runaways know each other by our paper cuts. Our blood inks the dark map of the mountains.

Kiki Petrosino, “Happineſs,” from White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

[violettesiren]

By dead gal or stove bones by rainbow or red bird red bird or cracked spine by silk wrap or jaw jaw by cold bodice, blush wing tick tick or sunk ship by tipped arrow, glass bite by weird catch or take that by chopped mountain, slick house boatneck or gloss hog striped awning, gold lawn by what’s that or so much without me or full prof full prof or nunchucks blood orange, brain gob time kill or toy star by black doll or briar thorn beg beg or gewgaw by sweetmeat, or gunlock or old maid or dreadnought by weakness or whitecap or grief-bacon, worksong by fieldwork or field mix slagged field or steel kilt by bone-bruise or kneesock I get my gift.

Doubloon Oath by Kiki Petrosino

[the-final-sentence]

Spiraling deep in the dusk of my body as saucers or moons pleased with their belts of colored dust & hailing no others.

Kiki Petrosino, from “Ghosts” 

[judgingbooksbycovers]

White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

By Kiki Petrosino.

Design by Alban Fischer.

[enjambedlife]

hello it’s time for poetry

Okay! As promised, here’s the first of hopefully-multiple posts where I ramble about a particular poem and I why I think it’s cool! I’m gonna tag these “poetry chat,” so if this seems insufferable you can just blacklist that.

I’m kicking things off with “Monticello House Tour” by Kiki Petrosino, from her book White Blood; you can also read it here, in Washington Square Review. I read White Blood for a class last semester and the whole collection is fantastic, but this poem in particular has haunted me ever since. It feels like a horror story, and I haven’t read a lot of poetry that I’d consider horror. Poems about horrifying topics, yes, poems with gory or violent or unnatural imagery, yes, but Petrosino’s gradual raising of stakes in terms of Jefferson’s presence and power feels similar to a creature-feature-type narrative: there’s an old local legend about The Monster, and then a vague sighting that gets dismissed, and then an up-close encounter that can’t be dismissed, and then The Monster is in your house.

If “Monticello House Tour” is a horror movie, then Thomas Jefferson is the thing that goes bump in the night. The poem opens:

What they never say is: Jefferson’s still building. He’s just using clear bricks now

(Sidenote: in the book version, he’s referred to as “Mr. Jefferson,” which somehow makes it feel even creepier? I think it’s because it sounds kind of childlike, and adds a little haunted-nursery flavor.) I could have done a whole post on just these first two lines and the metaphor there for white supremacy and empire-building and the way people who benefit from imbalanced power structures have a vested interest in keeping those structures hidden, but even on a basic descriptive level, we now have zombie Jefferson, which is scary enough in its own right! As the rest of the poem unfolds, the speaker tells “you”—it’s all written in second person—about how much control Jefferson has had over your entire life, without your knowledge. 

    Use of second person, also called direct address, isn’t uncommon in poems, but it doesn’t usually do as much heavy lifting as it does in this one. Petrosino really builds an atmosphere with lines like “you know the room/you were born in?” and “remember that wingchair you loved,” and the direct address doesn’t allow the reader any distance from the poem; we’re being pulled directly into it, with no space to get away from Jefferson and what he’s building. 

    Direct address flips the script of who is made vulnerable in the experience of reading a poem. In first-person poetry, the speaker tells their own thoughts and feelings to the reader, who, while ideally engaged by what they read, stays firmly off the page. Direct address pulls the reader into the poem’s world, an effect Petrosino takes full advantage of by making the reader her protagonist: it’s “your whole life” that has been designed by Jefferson, and the reader must place themselves in the confines of the poem. 

[misteerie]

Well, well. It’s a good thing you’re a finch now. You were born to gorge.

Kiki Petrosino, The Origins of Harriet Smith

[lifeinpoetry]

You ask Where does anything start? In muck. In a garden. You drink the drinks & bleed. You’re foam.

— Kiki Petrosino, from “Pastoral,” Witch Wife

[dragonscanbeplantstoo]

Week in Review

I forgot last week so there’s EXTRA literary stuff this week.

MetanoiaNovel

Words: 3,606

Chapters: 1 & 1/37th!!

Favorite line:

“She is still flushed from whatever she drank at the party, and the bright color makes her eyes look darker, somehow. Blacker than black. Void-like. The sort of eyes that make raw questions seem inevitable.”

The KittyFox Chronicles

They’re practicing good social distancing; 0 words written.

I’m taking bets now on how long they last.

Books

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

It was brilliant. I had no idea what was happening 87% of the time, but the writing was too pretty to care. Bees, everyone. Bees.

With Deer by Aase Berg

This is poetry written in Finnish (I think) and translated to English. Very weird. Some fascinating work with sound. About the death of nature, the body, and reproduction somehow all at once.

Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino

Another interesting book of poetry. I didn’t like this one as much. It was a lot of womanhood and fertility—which I don’t think about much—so I appreciated the new thought cuisine. But I read poems for concentrated images and sound; these are more effusive poems, so they weren’t my cup of tea.

Ararat by Louise Glück

This one is named after a mountain in Turkey, and in essence, it’s a collection of poems about sibling rivalry. Lots of flower imagery, interesting consonant matches. Louise Glück’s poetry books always have a complete narrative; super-satisfying to read.

Poem of the Week

“Steam rose from frozen wells, ice floes chafed the channel, the cold sweat broke out of the skin wall between my being and the cold. It was a hopelessly treacherous time.”

—from “Deer Quake” by Aase Berg

[jonathanjudge]

[we-are-yummy-bread]

Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino

I’ll conjure the perfect Easter & we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard— my pink gloves & your green gloves like parrots from an opera over the earth— We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths. I’ll conjure the perfect Easter dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon long cords of fusilli to remind you of my hair & my pink gloves. Your gloves are green & transparent like the skin of Christ when He returned, filmed over with moss roses— I’ll conjure as perfect an Easter: provolone cut from the whole ball woody herbs burning our tongues—it’s a holiday I conjure with my pink-and-green gloves wrangling life from the dirt. It all turns out as I’d hoped. The warlocks of winter are dead & it’s Easter. I dig up body after body after body with my pink gloves, my green gloves.

link to playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3mZqgX0EBkzedRKn699IJ3?si=4113ef78d21d423e

link to poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/146933/witch-wife 

[bostonpoetryslam]

What the sonnet form allows you to do is to explore a complex idea in a small space.

Kiki Petrosino, interviewed by Lucy Catlett for The Adroit Journal