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.?