White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books, 2020
In White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, poet Kiki Petrosino’s fourth collection, she delves into the Commonwealth. Reaching into the near and distant past, White Blood examines the slave trade, migration, freedom, and the legacies thereof. The book plays out across a number of sections, weaving together erasures of DNA test results, interrogations of ancestors long past, and a double crown of sonnets exploring Petrosino’s own triumph, grief, doubt, and loss.
Petrosino’s previous collection, Witch Wife (2017), examined in part childhood, childlessness, and expectations. “Do they know / about the botch / in my belly? … You know / it’s past time you bred,” she writes in “Little Gals.” White Blood continues Petrosino’s inquiry into her identity and past, examining the reverberations of her African, European, and American ancestry.
“The West African you has / split / and / expanded,” she writes via erasure in “What Your Results Mean: Western Africa 28%.” Petrosino follows Thomas Jefferson and his slaves from Paris to Virginia: giving us a tour of his plantation, writing about Jefferson’s mixed-race slave and lover Sally Hemings, and portraying herself as a “black dollar sign,” “a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies / into money” in “The Shop at Monticello.” From here she pushes on, making stops in Louisa County, delving into ledgers and county records, learning about and imagining the Free Smiths, ultimately arriving with trepidation at their gravesite in “Approaching the Smith Family Graveyard”:
What can harm you on Butler’s acreage? Open
your stride to cover more ground. Any
descendent may access a grave says the law
you printed before climbing the fence.
This is freedom, for now.
In “Happineſs,” Petrosino steps forward to her own more recent past. Using a double crown of sonnets, she recounts her undergraduate experience, capturing her elation—clutching at her acceptance letter so tight, “you could not prize me / out of my acceptance”—and also her many griefs: the suicide of her grandfather, the whispers about “those white kids / whose turn (some said) I took,” and her nagging doubts as well:
Who knew me then, yolk-in-shell?
In whose wagons did I ride safe
in my straw nest? Neat trick, close shave.
How was I the dream, the hope, of the slave?
Petrosino’s early work—exemplified by 2009’s Fort Red Border—displayed a strong, captivating voice. While that collection centered around an imagined relationship with Robert Redford (the collection’s title an anagram of his name), Petrosino also included poems about her identity, notably “Afro.” Her subsequent collections have taken this further, exploring what it means to be of mixed ancestry and multilingual in modern America, and she peels back layer after layer to arrive at the uncomfortable, still-beating truth. White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia is a masterpiece. Petrosino takes us from Africa to America, guiding us through her research and experience, through county records and slave ledgers, from the original plantations to the graves of ancestors who finally experienced the freedom denied so long. And from it emerges an understanding that nothing that exists today can be called perfect: better, certainly, but as the past echoes and lingers, there is still so much more work that needs to be done.
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Julian Day is a software developer and poet living in Winnipeg, Canada. His work has recently appeared in EVENT, Cypress, and Train. He won Editor’s Mom’s Choice in CV2’s 2019 2-Day Poem Contest.