Ask the Brindled: Poems, Paperback/No'U Revilla

Ask the Brindled , selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between "seed" and "summit" of a life--the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians--and it does not let readers look away. In this debut collection, No'u Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, mo'o, ma'i. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red--for desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. She hides knives in her hair "the way my grandmother--not god-- / the way my grandmother intended," and we heed; before her, "we stunned insects dangle." Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawai i with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes toward sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, civic. Through the medium of formal dynamism and the material of iwi culture and mythos, this living decolonial text both condemns and creates. Ask the Brindled is a song from the shattered throat that refuses to be silenced. It is a testament to queer Indigenous women who carry baskets of names and stories, "still sacred." It is a vow to those yet to come: "the ea of enough is our daughters / our daughters need to believe they are enough." Book specifications: Collection: National Poetry Dimensions: 226 x 150 Author: No'U Revilla Cover type: Paperback Publishing Year: 2022 Publishing Month: 8 Pages: 104 Language: English Publisher: Milkweed Editions Weight: 181 g