Hymn for the Black Terrific: Poems
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. --Diego Báez