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
表中的内容
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
关于作者
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.