KiKi Petrosino’s Fort Red Border speaks volumes as both a creative outlook on the imagined relationship between the speaker, an Italian African-American and her beloved Robert Redford, an iconic American actor. With her unique perspective on the world in which she lives, Kiki takes her readers on a fantasy between the natural and unnatural, and the real and unreal; questioning the validity of everyday life. Fort Red Border also explores the ideologies behind class, ethnicity, and inheritance, while making bizarre the mundane aspects of everyday life. Petrosino’s Fort Red Border is divided into three separate sections, the first being “Fort Red Border,” in which Petrosino explores a fictitious relationship with the renowned
…show more content…
It feels like a sharp turn into difficult terrain, more than a veer left or right”. The second section is not only one which brings the reader deeper into the speakers mind, but it is also a section that deals a lot with how things are perceived through our everyday lives. In her poem, “The Human Tongue Slows Down to Speak,” Petrosino’s linear narrative evolves into artwork among the pages. Her language picks up speed, “Silted slab, gone white with injury / in decorate dark, in bubbling vault mayflies / blind & basking, lifts itself,” (30) bringing the reader closer into her texts, entering into her fort, her life. Petrosino does this in order to give insight into the mundane, yet extraordinary tasks of everyday life. She takes something simple, and gives it meaning. She breathes life into something that may go unnoticed when she writes “to dock the dawn as it swamps the tonsils – To catch the blazing protests down.” (30) Unlike her other poems, which are simple and straightforward, this poem “ask[s] the reader to engage a different part of the brain—to read the poems out loud, to listen to the language’s musicality, to suspend one’s desire for immediate comprehension that may have occurred more readily in the first section,” which allows her to be more creative in her
It feels like a sharp turn into difficult terrain, more than a veer left or right”. The second section is not only one which brings the reader deeper into the speakers mind, but it is also a section that deals a lot with how things are perceived through our everyday lives. In her poem, “The Human Tongue Slows Down to Speak,” Petrosino’s linear narrative evolves into artwork among the pages. Her language picks up speed, “Silted slab, gone white with injury / in decorate dark, in bubbling vault mayflies / blind & basking, lifts itself,” (30) bringing the reader closer into her texts, entering into her fort, her life. Petrosino does this in order to give insight into the mundane, yet extraordinary tasks of everyday life. She takes something simple, and gives it meaning. She breathes life into something that may go unnoticed when she writes “to dock the dawn as it swamps the tonsils – To catch the blazing protests down.” (30) Unlike her other poems, which are simple and straightforward, this poem “ask[s] the reader to engage a different part of the brain—to read the poems out loud, to listen to the language’s musicality, to suspend one’s desire for immediate comprehension that may have occurred more readily in the first section,” which allows her to be more creative in her