Ask the Brindled - Poems

"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"--

List of contents

I.
Definitions of moʻo 1-3    
     Maunakea    
     About the effects of shedding skin    

     Welcome to the gut house    

     Eggs    

     He moʻo, he wahine    

     Kino    

     Moʻolelo is the theory    

     My grandma tells    

     Memory as missionary position    

     How to swallow a colonizer    

     Catalogue of gossip, warnings & other talk of moʻo, aka an ʻōiwi abecedarian    

     Don’t have sex with gods    

     When you say  “protestors” instead of “protectors”    

 II.
Definitions of moʻo 4-6    
     Iwi hilo means thigh bone means core of one’s being    
     Maui county fair    

     In search of a different ending    

          I. Summer with funeral & booze    

          II. Summer with funeral & playing house    

          III. Summer with funeral & 3 a.m.    

     Mercy    

     Ex is a verb    

     After she leaves you, femme    

     Lessons in quarantine    

     So sacred, so queer    

     Adze-shaped rain    

 III.
     Erasure triptych: ʻai    
     Sirens        out    

     Erasure triptych: aloha    

 IV.
Definitions of moʻo 7-8    
     Thirst traps    
     Myth bitch    

     Getting ready for work    

     For sisters who pray with fire    

     Dirtiest grand    

     The opposite of dispossession is not possession; it is connection    

     The ea of enough    

     Fire in Mākena    

     Recovery, Waikīkī    

     New patient form—medical history—creative option    

     Preparing Kaʻuiki    

     Basket    

     Shapeshifters banned, censored, or otherwise shit-listed, aka chosen family poem 
Notes

Mahalo 

About the author

Noʻu Revilla is the author of Ask the Brindled. She is an ʻŌiwi (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 in Effigies III in 2019, and she has performed throughout Hawaiʻi as well as Canada, Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations. She is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, where she teaches creative writing with an emphasis on ʻŌiwi literature, spoken word, and decolonial poetics. Born and raised in Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves in the valley of Pālolo on the island of Oʻahu.

Summary

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.”

Foreword

• Major galley campaign, with galleys available for sales force by request, major media, poetry media, queer-led media, regional (Hawaii) media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
• Major media outreach, positioning this title as an exciting 2022 poetry release from a rising star, for readers of Morgan Parks and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jake Skeets
• Bookseller campaign, with a focus on Hawaii and queer- and feminist-led bookstores, as well as stores in New York, Washington, Oregon and California
• Cover reveal and preorder social media campaign in collaboration with Native Books in Honolulu
• Book trailer produced by the publisher featuring author performing a poem from the book to be shared in a social media campaign and uploaded to Edelweiss
• Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts; special push to academic market for course adoption
• Advertising in Academy of American Poets and Poets & Writers
• Major launch event featuring multimedia, the book trailer, and major readers in Hawaii, with virtual touring in Minneapolis, New York, and Los Angeles

Additional text

“Poised in the electric space where history and lyric converge, Noʻu Revilla’s Ask the Brindled has new things to say about old things—the 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 Revilla’s accomplishment of a complex testimony. With both tenderness and urgency brought to poetry’s reparative labor, Ask the Brindled shows survivance as a gorgeous unfolding of story and polemic, audacity and song.”—Rick Barot

“Ask the Brindled is an astonishing addition to the canon (or canoe) of Pacific Islander literature. Noʻu 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

Product details

• Authors: No'u Revilla, Revilla No'i, Revilla No'u, Revilla Noʻu
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 09.08.2022
• EAN: 9781639550005
• ISBN: 978-1-63955-000-5
• No. of pages: 88
• Dimensions: 139 mm x 215 mm x 6 mm
• Illustrations: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Series: National Poetry Series
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; POETRY / Women Authors, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Places, POETRY / Australian & Oceanian, POETRY / LGBTQ+, Poetry / poems by individual poets