8 Books Published by Sarabande Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Bright: A Memoir by Kiki Petrosino Bright: A Memoir

by Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books (Aug 09, 2022)
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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, Brightasks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity.


Click for more detail about Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino Witch Wife

by Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books (Jul 12, 2022)
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The poems of Witch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one’s given body. In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history’s ghosts—the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft — and sings them to life.

Named “Best Poetry of 2017” by The New York Times, Witch Wife is back in a brand new paperback edition, featuring a reader’s guide and writing prompts from the poet herself.


Click for more detail about White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrosino White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

by Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books (May 05, 2020)
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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.


Click for more detail about Hymn for the Black Terrific by Kiki Petrosino Hymn for the Black Terrific

by Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books (Jul 30, 2013)
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The poems in this, Kiki Petrosino’s second collection, fulfill the promise of her debut effort, Fort Red Border, and further extend the terms of our expectations for this extraordinary young poet. The book is in two sections, the first a focused collection of wildly inventive lyrics that take as launch pad such far flung subjects as allergenesis, the contents and significance of swamps, a revised notion of marriage, and ancestors—both actual and dreamed. The eponymous second section is a cogent series, or long poem, based on a persona named the eater, who, along with the poems themselves, storms voraciously through tablefuls of Chinese delicacies (each poem in the series takes its titles from an actual Chinese dish), as well as through doubts and confident proclamations from regions of an exploratory self. Hymn for the Black Terrific has Falstaffian panache; it is a book of pure astonishment.


Click for more detail about Fort Red Border by Kiki Petrosino Fort Red Border

by Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books (Aug 01, 2009)
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Fort Red Border—the title itself an anagram for the name of this remarkable collection’s imaginary beloved—shows how language can be pleated, unfolded, and creased all over again into an endless origami of Eros… . By turns clowning, worshipful, heartbroken, and Faulknerian, these lyrics transport the reader to a familiar place made utterly strange.”—Srikanth Reddy

Kiki Petrosino has audacity to spare. She devotes the entire first section of her debut collection of poems to a putative affair the speaker is conducting with an imaginary Robert Redford. In the poems, Redford is solicitous of the speaker, as well as curious about her “difference,” probing her about the various meanings of “natural” when applied to her African-American hair. The poems’ hilarity and poignancy issue from the speaker’s distance from, and yearning toward, the center of mainstream culture. Redford serves as ideal partner, the embodiment of American masculinity—but there is also an odd tenderness and actuality to the relationship. In these poems Petrosino is fearless, proceeding from the recognizable terrain of daily life’s emotions rather than seeking refuge in the cool of mere obscurity. Petrosino’s poems scout a new path, one that discovers a believably fierce, vivid, feeling self.


Click for more detail about The Guyanese Wanderer: Stories (The Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature) by Jan Carew The Guyanese Wanderer: Stories (The Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature)

by Jan Carew
Sarabande Books (Jul 01, 2007)
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"This is a stunning collection. Mesmerizing. Carew’s foreshadowing is so deft, so subtle, we begin to ache before we should. We swat swamp mosquitoes as we sit around the smoke-fire with granite-faced Doorne and his sons, sensing peril. and we understand seduction before we are drawn into it. Carew’s eloquence is irresistible; his ear for retrieving language so precise, so respectful, we nod comfortably at old friends. Nuh? This experience under a full Guyanese moon is exquisite; is memory recovered. As a matter of fact, Carew transcends academics or mere creativity when he does the impossible: returns to the past with us as tagalongs."
?Mari Evans, author of Continuum and Clarity: (A Poet’s Perspective)

Jan Carew combines Caribbean folklore, ghost story, adventure tale, and literature of European exile to create a spirited dialect and colloquial voice that startles and delights; he’s comfortable confronting anything, racial prejudice or whimsical fable, the natural world or city slum.


Click for more detail about These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family by Afaa Michael Weaver These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family

by Afaa Michael Weaver
Sarabande Books (Aug 15, 2002)
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These Hands I Know offers readers the first-ever intimate view of the inner workings of black family life from the point of view of prose and poetry writers. This collection of seventeen essays includes portraits of fathers, mothers, nieces, brothers, grandparents, husbands, wives, and daughters—in short the full spectrum of absolute humanity in contemporary black families. Here, in letter form, a man speaks to his aunt, the family matriarch. A daughter rejects her father’s ideas of African-American identity. A young woman holds her niece in her hands for the very first time. And a son faces his father as an old man and finally comes to terms with his failings. These Hands I Know seeks to gather a resolutely honest picture of family life, however painful or joyous that truth may be."Family life is an insistent vessel traveling the space of our struggles to love and to be loved… . Africans and their descendants in America have always been nothing more and nothing less than human. If anything is constant and universal, it is suffering—personal, social, and political. If these essays offer anything, it is the affirmation of humanity."—From the Introduction by Afaa Michael WeaverMarketing Plans: Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings Reader copies available to booksellers through participation in Book Sense Advance Access ProgramContributors include: Fred D’Aguiar Tara Betts Gwendolyn Brooks Karen Chandler Edwidge Danticat Jarvis Q. DeBerry Gerald Early Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Lise Funderburg Walter Warren Harper Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Trent Masiki E. Ethelbert Miller Marilyn Nelson Kalamu ya Salaam Della Scott Alice WalkerAlso available by Afaa Michael Weaver Multitudes: Poems Selected and New TC $24.00, 1-889330-40-X • CUSA TP $14.95, 1-889330-41-8 • CUSA


Click for more detail about Multitudes: Poems Selected & New by Afaa Michael Weaver Multitudes: Poems Selected & New

by Afaa Michael Weaver
Sarabande Books (Jul 01, 2000)
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A generous, retrospective edition of this African-American poet.