Manyebook

To Those Who Were Our First Gods

For the past three years, Nickole Brown has been at work on a bestiary of sorts, investigating the complex, interdependent, and often fraught relationship between human and non-human animals. In this chapbook you’ll find the first results of this project — nine poems from her new manuscript, all focusing on the experience of creatures in a world shaped (and increasingly destroyed) by us. These pieces — some of them long sequences that operate like lean, lyric essays — have their sight set upon the natural world. But these are not poems of privilege that gaze out the window from a place of comfortable remove. No, these are not the kind of pastorals that always made Brown (and most of the working-class folks from her Kentucky childhood) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it; instead they speak in a queer, Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 48
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781931307390
  • Genres
  • poetry
  • Release date
  • 2018