Ask the Brindled

No?u Revilla, Noʻu Revilla

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781639550005
• eBook ISBN: 9781639550012
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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 ??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."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• I. Definitions of mo‘o
• II. Definitions of mo‘o
• III. Erasure triptych
• IV. Definitions of mo‘o
• Notes
• Mahalo
• About the Author