Ask the Brindled

Noʻu Revilla is the author of Ask the Brindled. She is an ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) queer poet and educator. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry, Literary Hub, ANMLY, Beloit, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. Her latest chapbook, Permission to Make Digging Sounds, was published in Effigies III in 2019, and she has performed throughout Hawaiʻi as well as Canada, Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations. She is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, where she teaches creative writing with an emphasis on ʻŌiwi literature, spoken word, and decolonial poetics. Born and raised in Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves in the valley of Pālolo on the island of Oʻahu.

Praise for Ask the Brindled“The 2021 National Poetry Series, Revilla’s debut reclaims Indigenous and queer Hawaiian identity, challenging colonial narratives by investigating history and personal experience.”—Publishers Weekly“In her debut collection, which won the 2021 National Poetry series, Native Hawaiian poet No’u Revilla explores bodies, language, the legacies of colonialism, the natural world, and grief. Her poems blend the history of the Hawaiian Kingdom, stories from ‘Öiwi culture, and experiences of queerness and queer love. It’s a beautiful book that honors the unique stories of queer and Native Hawaiian women in bright, unflinching, unforgettable language.”—Book Riot“No‘u Revilla gifts us vertical language with words falling down the page like droplets of rain and growing up like saplings in Ask the Brindled.”—India Lena González, Poets & Writers“To read Ask the Brindled, by No’u Revilla, is to visit a shapeshifting dictionary. Definitions morph into cosmogonies, specificities into protections against history, and abstractions into tactics for living changes.”—Lúcia Leão, RHINO Magazine“No’u Revilla is as singular a voice as can be found.”—Foreword Reviews“Revilla’s debut poetry collection is both lyrically and formally dynamic as she tackles themes such as sovereignty, queer desire, Hawaiian history, decolonization, queer grief, and sacred stories…. The book’s approach is intergenerational, both forward and backward looking as the poems reclaim past narratives foisted on queer Indigenous and Hawaiian peoples and dream up a future of abundance.”—Casey Stepaniuk, Autostraddle, “92 of the Best Queer Books of 2022”“Poised in the electric space where history and lyric converge, Noʻu Revilla’s Ask the Brindled has new things to say about old things—the work of love, the work of family and community, the work of articulating a self that is ‘shattered & many-named.’ Sustained by a wily variety of forms, the poems’ abiding figure is the shapeshifter, underscoring Revilla’s accomplishment of a complex testimony. With both tenderness and urgency brought to poetry’s reparative labor, Ask the Brindled shows survivance as a gorgeous unfolding of story and polemic, audacity and song.”—Rick Barot“Ask the Brindled is an astonishing addition to the canon (or canoe) of Pacific Islander literature. Noʻu Revilla embodies the many definitions of a queer, Indigenous shapeshifter. In this collection, she transforms the origins of hurt into seeds of healing through verse, prose, erasure, visual typography, and even a Hawaiian alphabet abecedarian. Cling tightly to these poems because they will crawl under your skin like sly lizards and ask you to shed fear and swallow abundance.”—Craig Santos Perez"As you devour Noʻu Revilla’s poems in Ask the Brindled for their stories and secrets, for their deftness and innovation of language and form, you will, in turn, be devoured by their shape-shifting, regenerative beauty and power. Like Hāʻōʻū, Maui and the great moʻo deities from whom she descends, Revilla reveals herself as warrior, protector, witness, survivor, lover, mana whine, healer, and teacher. With the fire of transformation, the fluid memory of water, and the shimmer of light on scales, this collection is nothing short of Indigenous queer feminist decolonial revelation and revolution. This is not poetry for the heart; this poetry is only for the gut. Prepare to be swallowed whole in body and emerge with new, raw skin. Here is ʻŌiwi poetry at its finest and fiercest."—Brandy Nālani McDougall"In Ask the Brindled, Noʻu Revilla revives a lineage nearly severed at the hands of occupation and empire. These protection songs and incantations of remembrance and resistance are forced by saltwater and mettle of queer, indigenous alchemy. Both in armor and in tender flesh, I feel seen in Revilla's world. Here, queer-femme-rage is medicine. To know the languages and aesthetics of the archipelagoes is to understand the vital arteries of earth: 'No matter who are you, who you / pretend to be on dry land, / when we get you, it is wet and honest.' Revilla wields narratives of sacrifice, regeneration, matriarchy, and femme identified myth with ferocity that resuscitates ancestral voices back to the sensual, back to blood."—Angela Peñaredondo“Ask the Brindled reminded me of the power of poetry to reclaim and resist. Brimming with queer Indigenous brilliance, I fell in love with Revilla's generous sharing of Oiwi culture, cosmology, and history. It was a distinct pleasure to learn so much from a book blooming with lyric lushness and formal experimentation.” — Halee Kirkwood, Birchbark Books & Native Arts

• I.Definitions of moʻo 1-3    Maunakea    About the effects of shedding skin    Welcome to the gut house    Eggs    He moʻo, he wahine    Kino    Moʻolelo is the theory    My grandma tells    Memory as missionary position    How to swallow a colonizer    Catalogue of gossip, warnings & other talk of moʻo, aka an ʻōiwi abecedarian    Don’t have sex with gods    When you say  “protestors” instead of “protectors”    II.Definitions of moʻo 4-6    Iwi hilo means thigh bone means core of one’s being    Maui county fair    In search of a different ending    I. Summer with funeral & booze    II. Summer with funeral & playing house    III. Summer with funeral & 3 a.m.    Mercy    Ex is a verb    After she leaves you, femme    Lessons in quarantine    So sacred, so queer    Adze-shaped rain    III.Erasure triptych: ʻai    Sirens        out    Erasure triptych: aloha    IV.Definitions of moʻo 7-8    Thirst traps    Myth bitch    Getting ready for work    For sisters who pray with fire    Dirtiest grand    The opposite of dispossession is not possession; it is connection    The ea of enough    Fire in Mākena    Recovery, Waikīkī    New patient form—medical history—creative option    Preparing Kaʻuiki    Basket    Shapeshifters banned, censored, or otherwise shit-listed, aka chosen family poem NotesMahalo