Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino (review)

In Witch Wife, Kiki Petrosino's latest collection of poems, we see lament pushed toward confession, prophesy toward oath, and regret toward elegy—all movements made by a serene poetic intelligence that seeks out the right form to describe experiences for which silence has long been the understandable, perhaps even desirable, response. We see, in fact, a refusal to accept the social conditions from which discomfort, grief, or shame might spring. Responding to what Mark Strand describes as the self-emptying path to poetic confidence in "The Remains," Petrosino goes the other way. "I fill myself with regrets," she writes, "& begin to speak," acknowledging that a draught of regret can steel a poet for unflinching song.

Reading these poems, one feels suddenly able to think free of the pernicious forces of religiously or socially determined unease. The poems do not aim to soothe or satisfy, yet they are not joyless. They are self-critical but not self-flagellating. They are motivated by a confidence to divulge hoary secrets, a calm Gothicism, an acceptance that behind the everyday, especially everyday language, one can feel the animal warmth of the Other Side. It's nothing so simple as skepticism. Call it faithful dubiousness.

Or call it dietrologia, an Italian concept never developed in English, one that signals a kind of faith that something is hidden beneath every explanation, that there's a reason other than the one you hear about, that there's a secret truth to which only a perspicacious few are privy. This habit of mind is composed of precisely what Occam's razor trims away. What's obvious cannot possibly be the truth, and, conversely, the truth cannot be obvious. It's not resignation or blind acceptance of what life presents but a stalling before explanation to ask more questions.

Dietrologia animates many of Petrosino's best poems and lets her see into the mysterious relationship between birth and death, being and nonbeing, heredity and progeny, children and ghosts. The poems would be eerie if they weren't so self-conscious, so matter of fact.

We follow the poet from an origin story in "Self-Portrait" throughout her early years, through "Voice Lessons," college love, Sting concerts, and "Study Abroad," then to marriage, a bracing Westerly breeze that takes her to India, and finally back to Monticello before ending in the "Purgatory" of desire—wanting what you can't have but not knowing what you can't have until you can't want it anymore. What a person has become is all that she might know, but the sense of insufficiency remains with it. There may be no better definition of dietrologia than that.

The "Self-Portrait" with which the book begins takes the form of Blake's "The Lamb," though the titular entity becomes sacrificial. Asking "Little gal, who knit thee?" Petrosino follows Blake's two-part structure, urging first a desire to question followed by a gruesome answer:

I peeled you with a pair of tongs.I laughed when no one loved you back& raked the mist to scarf your flesh.We come together in the dirt.I a rake & thou a twig;       All day we watch the long pig dig.       All day we watch the long pig dig.

The knitting of creation here can make an enveloping "scarf" against the cold, but it can't keep one from sensing the looming threat of cannibalism that will no doubt follow the frantic exertions of this "long pig." The repetition gives us another chance to figure out how much weight to give those monosyllables, the effect of which is something like reassurance in the face of terror, almost as if we were calmly perusing a magazine in a waiting room.

The phantasmagoric world Petrosino creates, while not so full of overt witchcraft as one might expect, presents itself as a muzzy realm just out of range of our usual perception. It is a world glimpsed "in the break before sleep," in the dimly lit space "glitched between passages," in the mid-regions of bodies or soil, where "pills & seeds...