Book - White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

Winner of the 2021 UNT Rilke Prize
Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Nominee
Library of Virginia Literary Awards Finalist
San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award
Winner of the 2021 Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice
Featured in 2021 CLMP Indie Lit Fair, "Power to the People"
IPPY Awards, Silver Medal for "Poetry"
Official Selection of Virginia for Route 1 Reads
The New York Times, “Poems that Poets Turn to in a Time of Strife”
The New York Times Book Review, “New and Noteworthy”
Library Journal, “Black Voices Matter 2020”
Publishers Weekly, "Spring 2020 Announcements, Top 10"
Publishers Weekly, “An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List”
Rumpus, “What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Women’s History”
The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: May 2020”
Library Journal, "Versifying / Collection Development: Poetry"
Poets.org, "National Poetry Month Books for 2020"
Southern Review of Books, “The Best Southern Books of May 2020”

In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem “The Shop at Monticello,” she writes: “I’m a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I’m a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.” Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino’s name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.