From the Stacks is a regular series on the Poetry Center Blog in which we solicit authors to wander our library and choose books that have been important to them and/or that they recommend.

Kiki Petrosino is the author of three books of poetry: Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013) and Fort Red Border (2009), all from Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, Tin House and on-line at Ploughshares. She is founder and co-editor of Transom, an independent online poetry journal. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she directs the Creative Writing Program. She also teaches part-time in the brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University. Her awards include a residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat and research fellowships from the University of Louisville’s Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Kiki's selections From the Stacks are:

Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis

Collected Works by Phillis Wheatley

The Lost Pilot by James Tate

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri

Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen

Spell by Dan Beachy-Quick

for LOVE: Poems 1950-1960 by Robert Creely

Mother Love by Rita Dove

Against Love Poetry by Eavan Boland

The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young