Nickole Brown 
Fanny Says [EPUB ebook] 

An “unleashed love song” to her late grandmother, Nickole Brown’s collection brings her brassy, bawdy, tough-as-new-rope grandmother to life. With hair teased to Jesus, mile-long false eyelashes, and a white Cadillac Eldorado with atomic-red leather seats, Fanny is not your typical granny rocking in a chair. Instead, think of a character that looks a lot like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, but darkened with a shadow of Flannery O’Connor. A cross-genre collection that reads like a novel, this book is both a collection of oral history and a lyrical and moving biography that wrestles with the complexities of the South, including poverty, racism, and domestic violence.



‘Nickole Brown’s unleashed love song to her grandmother is raucous and heart-rending, reflective and slap-yo-damn-knee hilarious, a heady meld of lyrical line and life lesson. Brown is blessed to be blood-linked to such a shrewd and singular soul, and the poet’s mix of monologue, myth, and unbridled mayhem paints a picture of a proper Southern lady who is just—well, unforgettable.’ —
Patricia Smith



‘In
Fanny Says, Nickole Brown distills the whole of America into one woman: bawdy, loving, racist, battered, healed, and gorgeous with determination. Our country has no history that does not touch the South. Our divisions are our unions. Here, Brown unleashes a voice returned to teach us a lesson. Reader, fair warning: you can’t hide from Fanny. You will be changed by this book.’ —
Rebecca Gayle Howell

Tabla de materias

Table of Contents



For Our Grandmothers



I



Fuck

Your Monthly

Fanny Says She and Her Husband Had Their First Fight

Fanny Linguistics: Malapropisms

Fanny Says She Spent It

Pepsi

Fanny Says Sometimes It’s Worth the Whupping

Go Put on Your Face

For My Grandmother’s Teeth, Pulled When She Was Thirty-Six

Fanny Says She Got Saved

Fanny Linguistics: Nickole

Fanny Says How to Make Potato Salad

Fanny Linguistics: Superstition

The Dead

Fanny Linguistics: Birdsong

Fanny Says She Learned to Throw the First Stone

Hettie

Fanny Says How to Be a Lady



II



Clorox

Fanny Says She Didn’t Use to Be Afraid

Fanny Linguistics: Publix Hieroglyphics

Fanny Linguistics: Origins

Crisco

For My Grandmother’s Feet, Swollen Again

Fanny Says How to Tend Babies

Fanny Says She Wanted To See Elvis

EPO

Fanny Says at Twenty-three She Learned to Drive

Dixie Highway

Fanny Linguistics: How to Say What You Mean

Pheno

Fanny Says She Made Him Feel Better

How To Dress Like Fanny

Fanny Says I Need to Keep Warm



III



A Genealogy of The Word



IV



Fanny Says She Knows How Little Time is Left

For My Grandmother’s Gallstones, Reconsidered

Sweet Silver

Fanny Says She Meets a Stripper in the ER

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit

Fanny Says Again the Same Dream on Morphine

Flitter

Fanny Asks Me a Question Before I’d Even Ask Myself

My Book, In Birds

A Translation for the Spiritual Mediator Who May Speak for Me to Frances Lee Cox, Wherever She May Be

To My Grandmother’s Ghost, Flying with Me on a Plane

Fanny Linguistics: Thaumatology

The Family Says It Celebrates Independence

An Invitation for My Grandmother

A Prayer for the Self-Made Man

For My Grandmother’s Perfume, Norell

Fanny Says Goodbye



Afterword

Sobre el autor

Nickole Brown grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and Deerfield Beach, Florida. Her books include her debut,
Sister, a novel-in-poems published by Red Hen Press in 2007, and an anthology,
Air Fare, which she co-edited with Judith Taylor. She received her MFA from The Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She worked at the independent, literary press, Sarabande Books, for ten years, and was the National Publicity Consultant for Arktoi Books and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She has taught creative writing at the University of Louisville, Bellarmine University, and the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Murray State. Currently, she is on faculty at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, and is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry at White Pine Press. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she is also an Assistant Professor at University of Arkansas at Little Rock.