Keeping (and Telling) the Past

In the Rooms of Monticello, Kiki Petrosino’ writes of both imagination and research. One allows the other. She writes of chairs and tables, chains and ships, bricolage, marvelous rooms, shadows of dreams and lies and stories. She writes too of mistakes, one finger slip, one extra addition on a keyboard, rendering retrieval: Online, entering an ancestor’s name, she adds an extra t to Harriet. There on the screen a digital record reveals her third great grandmother in 1866. This Harriett is taking “her three small children, looking for her husband who went missing after taking a job at a hotel in Richmond City” (Stanza 8). Other parts of the poem are evocative of reading rooms, of the silences there, and the great history of powers who made, still make records, the individuals caught in these systems. It is a beautiful journey to read. I will not give away anymore. Read here for yourself.