BRIGHT

A poet’s meditations on beauty and grief.

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, “an American slang term for light-skinned people of Black & white ancestry. It’s not a compliment.” The daughter of a Black mother and Italian American father, the author was born in Baltimore in 1979 and grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where she and her sister were the only two Black children in their parochial school. She longed for the kind of easy, exuberant friendships she saw among the White girls. “Back then,” she writes, “I believed in my own unworthiness as deeply as I believed in the Holy Trinity.” Loss, loneliness, and a yearning for order in a chaotic world: These themes recur as Petrosino meditates on fairy tales, Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, her African ancestry, the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Dante’s Inferno, and The Tempest. She was bereft by the suicide of her beloved paternal grandfather, Prospero, whose twice-yearly visits she cherished. Though Catholics deem suicide a sin, Petrosino refuses to think of her grandfather as “a wrongdoer, un malvivente.” In the Inferno, the soul of the suicide has become a thorn tree, an image that haunts her. “Someday,” she writes, “I’ll tell you of the hours I spent with Inferno in my hands, searching, again, for that thorn tree.” She searches, as well, for consolation in poetry. Hearing Seamus Heaney recite his poem “Digging” leads her to reflect on his enviable ability “to root down into multiple traditions of belonging: culture & poetry; faith & poetry; country & family & poetry.” Her own sense of belonging feels fragile. Brightness sets her apart, spiraling “around my losses, thorn & blood & briar.” Her brightness reflects the White world, creating a surface “where others feel invited to view themselves” and where she, in turn, is diminished.

A spare, affecting, lyrical memoir.