Two Brown Dots

(Paperback)

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Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Danni Quintos carves a space for brown girls and weird girls in her debut collection of poems.

Two Brown Dots explores what it means to be a racially ambiguous, multiethnic, Asian American woman growing up in Kentucky. In stark, honest poems, Quintos recounts the messiness and confusion of being a typical 90s kidwatching Dirty Dancing at sleepovers, borrowing eye shadow out of a friends caboodle, crushing on a boy wearing khaki shorts to Sunday masswhile navigating the microagressions of the neighbor kids, the awkwardness of puberty, and the casual cruelties of fellow teenagers. The mixed-race daughter of a dark skinned Filipino immigrant, Quintos retells family stories and Phillipine folklore to try and make sense of an identity with roots on opposite sides of the globe.

With clear-eyed candor and a wry sense of humor, Quintos teases the line between tokenism and representation, between assimilation and belonging, offering a potent antidote to the assumption that American means white. Encompassing a whole journey from girlhood to motherhood, Two Brown Dots subverts stereotypes to reclaim agency and pride in the realness and rawness and unprettyness of a brown girls body, boldly declaring: We exist, we belong, we are from here, and we will continue to be.

Reviews

With remarkable humor and candor, Danni Quintos blazes across these pages in a most magical debut. You'll be utterly charmed and entranced by her poems, which ignite questions of desire and justice rarely offered unless one amalgamates folklore and childhood in such a brilliantly expansive, moving way. This is it. This is the one you were waiting for.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments

Who but the Filipina girl, the keen discerning granddaughter of lola, with the unquiet mind, could turn the hurt and brutality, the invisibility of coming of age in late 20th century America, into an iridescent book of modern day brown girl psalms.
Nikky Finney, author of Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts

Danni Quintoss bookTwo Brown Dots, in addition to thinking hard about motherhood, the body, ancestry, and more, is one of the most beautiful and tender and honest depictions of the youthful negotiations of racism Ive ever read: the lostness, the entanglements, the confusions, the hurts, the loves. How many times I gasped or dropped my head into my hands or shook my head in recognition at how clearly, how precisely, she depicted what I have felt but never quite had the words or courage to say. It is a wonder how poems can care for us like that. It is a mercy.
Ross Gay, author ofBe Holding

Author Bio

Danni Quintos is the author of Two Brown Dots (BOA, 2022), which won the 20th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She is also the author of PYTHON (Argus House, 2017), an ekphrastic chapbook featuring photography by her sister, Shelli Quintos. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Cream City Review, Day One, Pluck!, Salon, and elsewhere. Her knitting has appeared on the shoulders and heads of many writers and artists, who are also friends and teachers. She received her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. A Kentuckian, a mom, an educator, and an Affrilachian Poet, Quintos lives in Lexington, KY.