scansion practice university of virginia

Petrosino’s words shimmer as she examines her connection with her physical body in a “quest” after her grandfather’s death. This and the following sections of the book, “The Spell,” “The Question,” and “The Departure,” are both agonizing and magical. It is more than the union of her mother and father Petrosino leaps between the writings of Thomas Jefferson and the continuation of slavery in the early United States, to finding music in names through the practice of scansion, to a particularly poignant and heartbreaking revelation of her grandfather’s suicide in the section titled “The Wish.” What follows is a fascinating exploration of history and literature in the hopes of tracing back her heritage. Her early experiences comprise the first few essays in the collection and are charged with heartache. In a heartbreaking passage, Petrosino compares her mother’s drawings of brown angels in a position of “tenderness and protection” and her own experience of studying her physical appearance in the mirror:Įven before Pennsylvania, there was something I didn’t like about my mouth, my teeth.

Everything about Shrewsbury meant “abundance, welcome, good luck.”ĭespite this promise, Petrosino describes a painful, lonely Catholic school experience, where her classmates would call her names and teachers made comments about her hair. In the 80s, her parents relocated the family to idyllic Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania, where weekends meant buying Amish bread and visiting Dutch Wonderland as a family for kiddie rides on the weekends. Petrosino was born in Baltimore to an Italian-American father and Black mother. Along the way, Petrosino explores the little curiosities and atrocities that connect her physical appearance to American history, religion and faith, epic literature, and her own lineage. Part experimental essay collection, part memoir, Bright is a stunning examination of love, family, and human nature through Petrosino’s childhood in a rural, predominantly white town to becoming a poet and professor at the University of Virginia. It’s a slang term for someone who is of mixed race, specifically of Black and white descent, and light-skinned. “It is not a compliment,” Petrosino says in the first few pages of her latest book, Bright. When I Google the exact definition, there are many meanings listed under the search bar - “full of light,” “having a vivid color,” “cheerful liveliness,” “intelligent and quick-witted.” For me, it has always been something good, but for poet Kiki Petrosino and many others, the word has a different meaning. I associate the word “bright” with positivity.

Scansion practice university of virginia