Sister: A Novel in Poems (Reissue)
Nickole Brown writes in a voice that is simultaneously vernacular and lyrical. It is a voice thick with the humidity and whirring cicadas of Kentucky, but the poems are dangerous, smelling of the crisp cucumber scent of a copperhead about to strike. Epistolary in nature, and with a novel's arc, Sister is a story that begins with a teen giving birth to a baby girl--the narrator--during a tornado, and in some ways, that tornado never ends.
In the hands of a lesser poet, this debut collection would be a standard-issue confession, a melodramatic exercise in anger and self-pity. But melodrama requires simple villains and victims, and there is neither in this richly complex portrait. Ultimately, Sister is more about the narrator's transgressions and failures, more about her relationships to her sister and their mother than about that which divided them. With equal parts sass and sorrow, these poems etch out survival won not with tender-hearted reflections but by smoking cigarettes through fly-specked screens, by using cans of aerosol hair spray as makeshift flamethrowers, and, most cruelly, by leaving home and trying to forget her sister entirely. From there, each poem is a letter of explanation and apology to that younger sister she never knew.
Sister recounts a return to a place that Brown never truly left. It is a book of forgiveness, of seeking what is beyond mere survival, of finding your way out of a place of poverty and abuse only to realize that you must go back again, all the way back to where everything began--that warm, dark nest of mother.
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Become an affiliateNickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she coauthored with Jessica Jacobs, and they teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative.
"At once fleeting and solid, Nickole Brown's Sister is a quietly moving, deeply felt record of the burnished world, a lovely album of one pilgrim's time on earth, thus far."
--Carole Maso
"The poems that comprise this haunted narrative are speckled with waterbeds, frosted hair, home pregnancy tests, disco, cigarettes, and black-light posters. The story is of a childhood mired in the 1970s. It is a dark, almost unforgivable world, yet in writing these grim and vivid poems, Nickole Brown has dredged up that all too rare human gift--mercy."
--Maurice Manning
"Using umbilicus as guide rail, the speaker of Nickole Brown's Sister--an unflinching and deeply intelligent first book--undertakes a hair-lifting expedition back to her childhood so as to return herself to the arms of a younger sister both long neglected and longed for. Proving that narrative and lyric are never mutually exclusive, Brown pulls the reader down the rain-swollen rush of river where her past gurgles with the 'sound of diesel, ' to reveal the pedophile--'a man who simply // cannot stop.' These poems, always stunning in their clairvoyance, advise us to take such experience and 'simply / bury it, but bury it / alive.' I cannot imagine a world in which one could read this book and not experience the confluence of dismay and wonder."
--Cate Marvin, Ploughshares
"This book embodies the deepest business of literature, to give voice to the torn-out tongue, and it does it the way only poetry can, by singing the song of its story. It's among the best books I've read recently, utterly undeniable, beautifully conjured, with something like perfect pitch. . . . This is Poetry, these are Poems."
--James Baker Hall
"An extraordinarily harrowing and riveting book. . . . Brown's managed, somehow, to create a tone for these poems that I've not heard in a long time--tough, often chilling, yet compassionate and wry by turns. . . . Sophistication laced with vulgarity and shadows."
--Dick Allen
"What Sister gives us is an unparalleled honesty. . . . Sister is honest in a way that is willing to pay any price, or suffer any hardship, to make sure that the truth gets told. You read this, and it challenges you to address the cost of anything less than truth. It's a shock, but a seductively lovely one, gorgeous even when it is ugly."
--Ray McDaniel
"In her debut collection, Brown weaves poetic phrases to take her readers on a journey that satisfies from the initiation to the conclusion, as she enlightens about the dysfunctional yet beautiful intimacies of a sisterly relationship. . . . Brown masterfully captures the essence of poetry by meshing equal parts emotion, storytelling, and style. Brown builds upon the rich tradition of Nikki Giovanni and Bob Hickok to craft her unique abilities in a manner that shows and rightfully deserves respect."
--Ashanti White, Library Journal
"Brown's forthright debut opens with an intimate address to a sister: 'I tell you this story because it is/ the story we need/ to believe our offal is divine.' . . . . A striking collection. The strongest poems are those stripped of commentary, in which rough memories are offered as strange discoveries, as in 'Jessica Meyers in the Corn' 'In puddles of seeping/ groundwater, I plugged in electrical cords and her skin/ burned black.' These are brave confessions, apologies and recollections lay everything bare: 'I want nothing/ but truth between us, but I am afraid."
--Publishers Weekly, August 2007