Sister

This new edition of Nickole Brown's debut--published ten years after it first appeared--holds just as much relevancy and power today as it did a decade ago. In this special revised edition are all of the poems that first came to light in 2007, along with a discussion with the author and craft guide geared towards survivors writing through their own trauma. 

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.

"Deftly braiding lyric and narrative, Sister journeys back to a fraught Kentucky childhood to ask, 'What is enough to bind us?' The poems are vivid with indelible images--'The porcelain cool white womb' of a bathtub, her mother's 'pelvic frying pan belted in disco gold.'  Sister is story of darkness and danger, but in this poet's gifted hands, one of 'light nonetheless.' Nickole Brown works the miracle of all good art, recording the unbearable even as she transforms it."
--Ellen Bass, poet & co-author of The Courage To Heal

"I'm delighted that Sibling Rivalry Press has published this second edition of Nickole Brown's remarkable collection of poems, Sister. In the last two decades or so we've witnessed a major shift in the literary center of gravity in the United States--especially in poetry--and right in the middle of that change was Brown's outstanding book. . . . In the last decade since its first publication, the power of Sister has only grown."

--From the Afterword by Sue William Silverman