The highly anticipated, first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino. Bright: A Memoir , the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. “Bright,” a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author’s upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity. Poets & Writers, "Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin" Publishers Weekly , "Books of the Week The Millions, "Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2022 Book Preview" Essence , "18 New Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer” The Root , "We Found Even More Books by Black Authors You Should Read This Month" The Southern Review of Books , "The Best Southern Books of August 2022" Englewood Review of Books , "Books of the Week” "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 "[A] stunning exploration...[Petrosino's] work packs a hefty punch, offering a luminous descent into the complicated racial history of the United States and a nuanced path to a more expansive future. This challenging and soulful work shines with intellect." — Publishers Weekly "As a student of duality between discipline and surrender, Petrosino employs every tool in her writer’s arsenal: the entries represent the epistolary form, the devastating monostich, and cataloging authority. Here, inquisitions are portals, bending time toward the eternal present." — Foreword Reviews , online and print "Part experimental essay collection, part memoir, Bright is a stunning examination of love, family, and human nature." — The Southern Review of Books "Whether it's tales of her Italian grandfather escorting her home from the bus stop to protect her, or her mother and sister coloring books together. . . Petrosino envelops us in these lovely moments, but simultaneously reminds us of the heartbreaking ones yet to come. Both will continue to play out in my mind long after I've turned the final page and Petrosino's brilliance has found its way back upon my shelf." —Ayaat Ismail, Miracle Monocle "Kiki Petrosino’s Bright is 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 and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude “In Bright: A Memoir , with the attentiveness of an archivist, Petrosino explores how, ‘[i]n each of her cells, continents merged & drifted,’ as she longs both for the hems of her African ancestors’ garments and a single letter written to her by her Italian grandfather. In this formally inventive essay collection, she charts her way through centuries, languages, cultures, and religions in startling lyricism where poetry emerges as the divine being— manifesting itself in the ‘invisible arpeggio of a hummingbird’s wing’ and the ‘velvety flowers that unlatched from dark green buds.’ Petrosino’s language is visceral, showing us in the opening section how ‘there’s a mean smile’ embedded in the word ‘bright,’ forcing us to move our mouths to experience it, to live inside that violence. Despite the embodied discomfort in this book—even in the spectral unfolding of a fairy tale to which we know there may be no happy ending—it is difficult to peel away from the powerful pull of the prose in this book.” —Chet'la Sebree, author of Field Study “At once intimate and personal as well as larger and societal, Bright negotiates tenderness and thorns to remind us that the African American experience has never been one simple story. To read Kiki Petrosino’s evocative self-reckoning is a great gift—and a call for understanding.” —Lauret Savoy, author of Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape “Let me describe the powers of Bright: A Memoir . Within it, I find pages of strength (holding up a sentence of nearly unbearable weight, but not letting go), of restr
