Overview

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

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9781336146488

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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.

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