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From award-winning author Kiki Petrosino comes a poignant exploration of identity, heritage and belonging for readers of Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral and Seamus Heaney’s North
Through vivid imagery and spare, precise verse, Kiki Petrosino’s Perfect Italian examines the complexities of cultural inheritance, the nuances of language, and the emotional weight of diasporic identity as a Black and Italian American. The collection weaves personal memories with ancestral echoes, reflecting on themes of family, grief, and the search for connection across generations and geographies. From the sensory experiences of travel in Italy to the tension of navigating dual identities, Petrosino’s work captures the beauty and struggle of self-discovery. Her language creates a rich tapestry of emotions and landscapes, offering a profound meditation on the intersections of race, culture, and belonging.
Perfect Italian is the third and final installment in Petrosino’s series on heritage and identity. Previous books in the collection, also published by Sarabande, include White Blood (2020) and Bright (2022)
PRAISE FOR PERFECT ITALIAN
"In poems alive to the primal wisdom that language is the heartbeat of consciousness, we encounter songs of a self recording its significant journeys as it struggles to discover, reclaim, and praise the terms of its being through identities of language and birth—citizenship and barrier and abundance. Whether set in the Baltimore of childhood, the Italy of a young exchange student investigating her grandfather’s country even as she learns his language (and Dante’s) or, back in America, ascending the history-burdened trail that rises toward Jefferson’s Monticello, Petrosino’s extended meditation is rich with eloquence in every line." —Gregory Orr, author of Selected Books of the Beloved
"Reader, what you hold is a perfectly beautiful book." —Charlie Clark, author of The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin
"Petrosino is a poet of deep insight, of taproots, bloodlines, and soil; of legacies blown across continents like a hot sirocco; and of the songs that call us home. I’d follow Perfect Italian across oceans." —Alexis Orgera, author of Agatha: Poems for the Bodies in Revolt
"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. ‘I wanted to write a beautiful book,’ Petrosino writes in the opening poem. She has!" —Kathleen Rooney, author of Where Are the Snows
"Kiki Petrosino’s Perfect Italian is a sensorial feast of sight, sound, and flavor. [...] These poems achieve linguistic mastery, revealing the poet’s truth that “The good part of myself lives / here. In piles of ecstatic scraps.” —Bethany White, author of A Black Doe in the Anthropocene
"Petrosino is our greatest crafter (la miglior fabbra!) of the past." —Dan Rosenberg, author of Bassinet
PRAISE FOR KIKI PETROSINO
"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
"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
Kiki Petrosino is the author of several poetry collections which include Perfect Italian (2026) White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (2020), Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), and Fort Red Border (2009), and the memoir Bright (2022) all published by Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is a Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing programs. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors. Petrosino is based in Charlottesville, VA.