Ask the Brindled: Poems
By (Author) No'u Revilla
Milkweed Editions
Milkweed Editions
15th November 2022
United States
General
Non Fiction
811.6
Paperback
88
Width 139mm, Height 215mm, Spine 6mm
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 lifethe body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiiansand it does not let readers look away.
In this debut collection, Nou Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, moo, mai. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page redfor desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. She hides knives in her hair the way my grandmothernot god / the way my grandmother intended, and we heed; before her, we stunned insects dangle. Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawaii 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.
Praise for Ask the Brindled
The 2021 National Poetry Series, Revillas debut reclaims Indigenous and queer Hawaiian identity, challenging colonial narratives by investigating history and personal experience.Publishers Weekly
In her debut collection, which won the 2021 National Poetry series, Native Hawaiian poet Nou Revilla explores bodies, language, the legacies of colonialism, the natural world, and grief. Her poems blend the history of the Hawaiian Kingdom, stories from iwi culture, and experiences of queerness and queer love. Its a beautiful book that honors the unique stories of queer and Native Hawaiian women in bright, unflinching, unforgettable language.Book Riot
Nou Revilla gifts us vertical language with words falling down the page like droplets of rain and growing up like saplings in Ask the Brindled.India Lena Gonzlez, Poets & Writers
To read Ask the Brindled, by Nou Revilla, is to visit a shapeshifting dictionary. Definitions morph into cosmogonies, specificities into protections against history, and abstractions into tactics for living changes.Lcia Leo, RHINO Magazine
Nou Revilla is as singular a voice as can be found.Foreword Reviews
Revillas debut poetry collection is both lyrically and formally dynamic as she tackles themes such as sovereignty, queer desire, Hawaiian history, decolonization, queer grief, and sacred stories. The books approach is intergenerational, both forward and backward looking as the poems reclaim past narratives foisted on queer Indigenous and Hawaiian peoples and dream up a future of abundance.Casey Stepaniuk, Autostraddle, 92 of the Best Queer Books of 2022
Poised in the electric space where history and lyric converge, Nou RevillasAsk the Brindledhas new things to say about old thingsthe work of love, the work of family and community, the work of articulating a self that is shattered & many-named.Sustained by a wily variety of forms, the poems abiding figure is the shapeshifter, underscoring Revillas accomplishment of a complex testimony.With both tenderness and urgency brought to poetrys reparative labor,Ask the Brindledshows survivance as a gorgeous unfolding of story and polemic, audacity and song.Rick Barot
Ask the Brindledis an astonishing addition to the canon (or canoe) of Pacific Islander literature. Nou Revilla embodies the many definitions of a queer, Indigenous shapeshifter. In this collection, she transforms the origins of hurt into seeds of healing through verse, prose, erasure, visual typography, and even a Hawaiian alphabet abecedarian. Cling tightly to these poems because they will crawl under your skin like sly lizards and ask you to shed fear and swallow abundance.Craig Santos Perez
"As you devourNou Revillas poems in Ask the Brindled for their stories and secrets, for their deftness and innovation of language and form, you will, in turn, be devoured by their shape-shifting, regenerative beauty and power. Like H, Maui and the great moo deities from whom she descends, Revilla reveals herself as warrior, protector, witness, survivor, lover, mana whine, healer, and teacher. With the fire of transformation, the fluid memory of water, and the shimmer of light on scales, this collection is nothing short of Indigenous queer feminist decolonial revelation and revolution. This is not poetry for the heart; this poetry is only for the gut. Prepare to be swallowed whole in body and emerge with new, raw skin. Here isiwi poetry at its finest and fiercest."Brandy Nlani McDougall
"In Ask the Brindled, Nou Revilla revives a lineage nearly severed at the hands of occupation and empire. These protection songs and incantations of remembrance and resistance are forced by saltwater and mettle of queer, indigenous alchemy. Both in armor and in tender flesh, I feel seen in Revilla's world. Here, queer-femme-rage is medicine. To know the languages and aesthetics of the archipelagoes is to understand the vital arteries of earth: 'No matter who are you, who you / pretend to be on dry land, / when we get you, it is wet and honest.' Revilla wields narratives of sacrifice, regeneration, matriarchy, and femme identified myth with ferocity that resuscitates ancestral voices back to the sensual, back to blood."Angela Pearedondo
Ask the Brindled reminded me of the power of poetry to reclaim and resist. Brimming with queer Indigenous brilliance, I fell in love with Revilla's generous sharing of Oiwi culture, cosmology, and history. It was a distinct pleasure to learn so much from a book blooming with lyric lushness and formal experimentation. Halee Kirkwood, Birchbark Books & Native Arts
Nou Revilla is the author of Ask the Brindled. She is an iwi (Native Hawaiian) queer poet and educator. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry, Literary Hub, ANMLY, Beloit, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress.Her latest chapbook,Permission to Make Digging Sounds,was published inEffigies IIIin 2019, and she has performed throughout Hawaii as well as Canada, Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations.She is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii-Mnoa, where she teaches creative writing with an emphasis on iwi literature, spoken word, and decolonial poetics. Born and raised in Waiehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves in the valley of Plolo on the island of Oahu.