Ask the Brindled

Poetry

Ask the Brindled

Poems
WINNER OF THE 2021 NATIONAL POETRY SERIES, SELECTED BY RICK BAROT

"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
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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 Hawaiʻi 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 ʻŌiwi 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.”

Keywords: 
Indigenous poetry; queer poetry; Oceania; Hawaii; Hawaiʻi; erasure poetry; blackout poetry; Hawaiian mythology; Hawaiian history; feminism; women; erotic poetry; intimacy; decolonial poetry; abecedarian poetry; sonnets; mothers; daughters; grandmothers
ISBN:
9781639550005
Publish Date: 
08/09/2022
Pages: 
104
Size: 
9 × 6 × 0.25 in
Weight: 
6.3 oz
Author

Noʻu Revilla is the author of Ask the Brindled. She is an ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) queer poet and educator.

Praise and Prizes

Blog Post

Milkweed Staff – 03/03/2022

Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng is my collaboration soulmate. As queer ʻŌiwi femme creatives, we both use art to uplift and ask...