Welcome to Litsy!

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.�