Review by Booklist Review
Petrosino's Hymn for the Black Terrific takes its title from a description in Moby-Dick of Ahab's intimidating stance at the captain's table, and its poems invert the fated megalomaniac's obsession with whiteness. Instead, Petrosino's verses offer vibrant, inventive meditations on darkness in many forms, from everyday discoveries of coal tar and tungsten, to sinister ingots of scorched iron, and the unusual wedges of swans' webbed feet. But Petrosino focuses especially on the colored body. In the Mulattress series, Petrosino disassembles a sentence from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, which claims people of color secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor. Petrosino incorporates these words and phrases into a sestina-like sequence, spinning lyrics in layers of exquisite, unchained frenzy, until the words' meanings mutate, like genes. Petrosino concludes the collection by creating the eater, an entity less a physical being than a center of intersecting desires, like a monster from a Hayao Miyazaki animated film, powerful yet sympathetic.--Baez, Diego Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Petrosino's second book after her well-received debut, Fort Red Border (love poems to an imagined Robert Redford), begins as a lyrical rush: "If kept the colored if of knife, the colored feet, & kept a folio behind a door outsized. My will to touch, outsized, that colored if..If you, my scrim, my awl, behind a door should sleep, & then-if I should come, in swarms of dark?" These poems have an edge, and there's a flair for strangeness in the fragmented lines: "I live in a country they/ didn't leave for me. My color secretes/ like taffy through my pores, or should. But I'm less/ polite when pulled. Try to tell by the kidneys." The book's final section introduces the "eater," whose "mind is dark as drink" and whose relationship to food, love, and the world at large is unusual and wild. This is the point when readers may start asking questions, and the poem will answer without giving itself away too easily. VERDICT Petrosino is a rising young poet whose work libraries will want to own for readers looking for fresh talent.-Annalisa Pesek, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
