Perfect Italian

Praise for Perfect Italian ""Allusive and inventive, playful and prayerful, Kiki Petrosino's Perfect Italian perfectly captures the loneliness and ecstasy of her search for heritage. With vivid precision, this collection serves speech, song, grammar, weeping, and silence along with wine, pizza, breadcrumbs, figs, and amaro. You can devour this book in an hour, but should savor and stretch it out like a feast."" --Kathleen Rooney, author of Where Are the Snows ""Kiki Petrosino's Perfect Italian is a sensorial feast of sight, sound, and flavor. [...] If memory itself has color, it is pure gold, and we are a humble chorus of witnesses. These poems achieve linguistic mastery, ...."" --Artress Bethany White, author of A Black Doe in the Anthropocene ""From the seed of the syllable, Kiki Petrosino's Perfect Italian germinates a gorgeous, intimate landscape [...] Petrosino is our greatest crafter of the past."" --Dan Rosenberg, author of Bassinet Praise for Witch Wife ""[Kiki Petrosino's poetry] is a vision of anger as fuel and fire, as a powerful inoculation against passivity, as strange but holy milk suckled from the wolf."" --Leslie Jamison, The New York Times ""In Petrosino's singular world, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange, suddenly irresistible, settles deep in the bones. Sparkling with sly wordplay and fantastical imagery, these are not only masterful poems but mighty incantations. Utterly spellbinding."" --Booklist ""Petrosino has long been one of my favorite poets, working her linguistic sorcery through the heart's palette with aching joy and stinging creativity. Her words kindle. Her poems are pure fire. Witch Wife might be her finest burn yet."" --Amber Tamblyn Praise for Bright ""Award-winning poet Petrosino probes her identity as a poet and biracial woman in a slender, expressive memoir that swirls around the meaning of bright. . . . A spare, affecting, lyrical memoir."" --Kirkus Reviews ""Kiki Petrosino's Bright is an astonishing lyric archive of the body--who it's made of; what's imposed upon it; what's extracted from it--the result of which is one of the most moving, and incisive documents on the brutalizing fictions of race that I've ever read. As formally experimental as survival is, Bright lights the ways our different bodies in different places at different times are forced again and again to negotiate and endure and evade and refuse those stories. Refusal the result of which is sometimes as beautiful, as luminous, as the book in your hands."" --Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights ""Let me describe the powers of Bright: A Memoir. Within it, I find pages of strength (holding up a sentence of nearly unbearable weight, but not letting go), of restraint (knowing that the sentence must be held up alone), and of patience (all the measured breaths taken in order to reach that utterance). This book astonishes me. Kiki Petrosino is not only a superb writer, but a dazzling reader, and to glimpse, within this memoir, her way of perceiving what she encounters is revelatory. Whether parsing the details of a landscape or the notebooks of Thomas Jefferson, Petrosino finds within them more than what their authors meant to say. What she has to say--of childhood, history, race, family, literature, inheritance--is so immense you might be surprised it can be contained within a book of this size, but this is another of its powers. Open it up, and you'll find the expertly-compressed energy of its language expanding into a beautiful new shape, one you'll treasure."" --Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book