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 'Oiwi 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.
No'u Revilla is the author of Ask the Brindled. She is an 'Oiwi (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 Hawai'i as well as Canada, Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations. She is an assistant professor at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, where she teaches creative writing with an emphasis on 'Oiwi literature, spoken word, and decolonial poetics. Born and raised in Wai'ehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves in the valley of Palolo on the island of O'ahu.
Title: Ask the Brindled: Poems (National Poetry Series)
Author: Revilla, No'u
ISBN: 9781639550005
Binding:
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: 2022-09-22
Number of Pages: 88
Weight: 0.1801 kg
Praise for Ask the Brindled
The 2021 National Poetry Series, Revilla's 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 No'u Revilla explores bodies, language, the legacies of colonialism, the natural world, and grief. Her poems blend the history of the Hawaiian Kingdom, stories from 'OEiwi culture, and experiences of queerness and queer love. It's a beautiful book that honors the unique stories of queer and Native Hawaiian women in bright, unflinching, unforgettable language. -BookRiot
To read Ask the Brindled, by No'u Revilla, is to visit a shapeshifting dictionary. Definitions morph into cosmogonies, specificities into protections against history, and abstractions into tactics for living changes. -Lucia Leao, RHINO Magazine
No'u Revilla is as singular a voice as can be found. -Foreword Reviews
Poised in the electric space where history and lyric converge, No'u 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. No'u 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 devour No'u Revilla's 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 Ha'o'u, Maui and the great mo'o 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 is 'Oiwi poetry at its finest and fiercest. -Brandy Nalani McDougall
In Ask the Brindled, No'u 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 Penaredondo
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
