To Those Who Were Our First Gods

by Nickole Brown

For the past three years, Nickole Brown has been at work on a bestiary of sorts, investigating the complex, interdependent, and often fraught relationship between human and non-human animals. In this chapbook you’ll find the first results of this project—nine poems from her new manuscript, all focusing on the experience of creatures in a world shaped (and increasingly destroyed) by us. These pieces—some of them long sequences that operate like lean, lyric essays—have their sight set upon the natural world. But these are not poems of privilege that gaze out the window from a place of comfortable remove. No, these are not the kind of pastorals that always made Brown (and most of the working-class folks from her Kentucky childhood) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it; instead they speak in a queer, Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, Animals

48 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2018

About the author

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition was reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. The audio book of that collection came out in 2017. Her poems have, among other places, appeared in The New York Times, The Oxford American, Poetry International, Gulf Coast, and The Best American Poetry 2017. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years until she gave up her beloved time in the classroom in hope of writing full time. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches periodically at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, Poets House, the Poetry Center at Smith College, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at four different animal sanctuaries. She’s at work on a bestiary of sorts about these animals, and a chapbook of those poems called To Those Who Were Our First Gods recently won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize.

Reviews

[David B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short review: TO THOSE WHO WERE OUR FIRST GODS is a fantastic dialogue of the relationship between the human and animal, with the recognition that humans are, indeed, animals. Nickole Brown has a sensitivity to the natural world that she easily proffers with exquisite language. Ms. Brown gives us the facts of the relationship of humans to animals, the sometimes violent, the often unfortunate misunderstandings, and manages, yet, to stir some hope that we have the capacity to care for those affected and/or displaced by the encroachments of civilization. Definitely worth more than one read to catch all the nuances.

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a truly unique book of poetry that examines the animal world and humanity's relationship with it--and all of the messiness, thoughtlessness, fascination and love that is part and parcel. The writer brings up serious questions about the callous ways we have dealt with the planet's other inhabitants without veering into a haranguing tone that would turn off most readers. There are also flashes of humor and beauty, as well as admiration for those who care for cast-off creatures at an animal sanctuary.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

So beautiful & refreshing. Do you know how hard it is to capture any of these topics without falling into sentimentality?? How hard it is to toe that line between sentimentality and sentimentt?? & yet this collection balances that cost with the beauty of sentiment all the way through. Love!!

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems spoken in a memorable voice that sensitize the reader to the world of non-human animals that coexist with us.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nickole Brown writes about the relationship of people and animals. As a volunteer at four animal sanctuaries, you can imagine where her sympathies lie. She begins with “A Prayer to Talk to Animals,” saying, “I want to open my mouth and sound a language that calls all language home.” She ends with a poem called “Mercy,” trying to train other species to speak that word so that humans might finally take notice. "The Scat of It" is the only ode to feces I've ever read. Her poems are at times fanciful or endearing, but more often gritty, exposing human inhumanity and our selfish destruction of our planet.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nickole Brown's "To Those Who Were Our First Gods" speaks through colloquial, even childlike voices desperately listening for the animal others to speak their pleas for "Mercy." Even as she does so, we hear the fatalism of her deep humanity (animality?) in the examples she gives of our wasteful and callous misuse of our brothers and sisters in life. She still has enough faith (anger) to demand hope:

Hope, you know by now,
is not a thing you feel
but something you do...

She mourns the passing of each individual animal life as she "close[s] the extinguished/horizons of his eyes." If only these fellow creatures could speak a word "mercy" we might hear and still our ravening hands. Read and care.

[eb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Nickole Brown’s deft mix of colloquial language, the landscape of poverty, and deep meditations on the human condition and animals as sentient beings. She has a whole poem about literal shit where she doesn’t say the word but it’s right there— descriptive and epithet at once.

I also appreciate how long the poems are— in a 44 page chapbook, only 9 poems and several sections.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nikole Brown is a joy to read in this chapbook from Rattle. Her poetry is a nudgng reminder of objet trouve, a surrealist's dream of poetic art from the streets. Her "No Ark" builds in intensity as she shifts through the landscape of clutter and debris; and lands, like the Lunar Moth, to tranform it all. She leaves the reader gasping with a strange sense of hope.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are full of compassion, which dissolves the usual human-animal hierarchy. Instead these poems ask us to consider our fellow beasts as worthy of the same love and attention humans share with other humans. Also, Brown's voice, beautiful and distinct, sings these psalms with Appalachia flair. Wonderful, wonderful book.

[Emily Shearer · Rating 5 out of 5]

SO good. Every animal lover and animal hater and poetry lover and poetry hater and zookeeper and tree climber and oil driller and politician and librarian and child and mother and father and my friend Katherine Davis Williams and @Lisa Maack and the lady down the street who loves dogs more than she loves her kids and goat and elephant and dolphin and pig should read and breathe this book.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a chapbook published by Rattle in 2018. The poems in it focus on the poet's experiences with animal welfare organizations and is a wonderful testament to the nitty gritty difficulty and frequent heartbreak inherent in that work.

I have no idea whether she has read Pattiann Rogers but much of her poetry reminded me of Rogers, which is a compliment as far as I'm concerned since she's one of my favorite poets. Rogers walks strongly in the lineage of Whitman with a strong love of the world, even its less desirable aspects.

Nickole Brown is also willing to love ugliness and difficulty by wrapping them in words. Hence her poem "The Scat of It" (https://www.thrushpoetryjournal.com/n...) and "Self-Portrait as Land Snail (http://bhreview.org/2019/11/15/self-p...)." In general, she is dealing with people's carelessness and cruelty toward animals and also their determination to care for the wounded even when it seems hopeless. These are tough subjects to look at baldly, as she does, without it becoming unbearable and it's her facility as a poet that makes that possible.

For those who know they have a low tolerance for poems over a page in length, this is not your volume.

For those who want to make a point of reading poetry by LGBTQ poets, Nickole Brown is one. Her website: https://www.nickolebrown.com/poems

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Rattle’s latest chapbook prize winner. It is weird and wonderful, unlike any book of poetry I have read before. Brown’s “first gods” were animals, depicted on cave walls. In these poems, she aches to communicate with them, to reclaim her animal nature. The language is sassy, beginning with the first lines of the first poem: “Lord, I ain’t asking to be the Beastmaster/gym-ripped in a jungle loincloth/or a Doctor Dolittle or even the expensive vet/down the street, that stethoscope redhead,/her diamond ring big as a Cracker Jack toy.” … She goes on to say all she wants is a “tiny tear between this world and that.” In other poems, she offers an elegy to a possum, a story about a kid goat, and a plea to the animals to speak to her. Brown has published two other poetry books, Sister, a novel-in-poems, and Fanny Says, a biography-in-poems. For me, she is a new and intriguing voice.

[Erich H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was introduced to Nickole Brown's work via Elizabeth Coleman's "HERE: Poems for the Planet". After reading "A Prayer to Talk to Animals", and later finding "Collective Nouns for the Anthropocene" online, I ordered this chapbook from Rattle.

This is the most time I've spent with a chapbook in a long time. I really despise the term "savored" when used with poetry, but that's exactly what I did with these. Every page is beautiful, gut-wrenching, and no matter what, always seems to be exactly what I needed to read at the moment, even if I didn't know it. Nickole Brown is my new favorite poet.

[David Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those somewhat rare but thoroughly delightful collections that captures me from the first page and holds my rapt attention right through the acknowledgements. These poems exploring the relationship between animals and people are as good as they can be: I was moved, entertained, discomforted, and overjoyed during my delightful journey with this volume. In particular, the poem about the biblical character Samson, and another one about a local animal sanctuary were both among the best poetry I've read this year. This was my first exposure to the poetry of Nickole Brown and I cannot wait to purchase and read everything I can find by her.

[Ron Mohring · Rating 4 out of 5]

". . . each common bottle fly an emerald/ frantic to be the first into the soft and liquid/ cathedral of her body"
["Elegy for the Beauty I Was Taught to Detest"]

I'm a huge fan of Nickole's poems. My favorite poems in this chapbook are "Self-Portrait as a Land Snail" and (especially) "The Scat of It" though throughout the collection are moments of stunning language and observation, as in "your hair lining every hollow, warming/ a throne of owls." ["To Those Who Were Our First Gods: An Offering"]

[Re-bound with size 20 persimmon cord because staples, y'all, are the devil's playthings.]

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chapbook of poems about animals, queer love, and life.

from A Prayer to Talk to Animals: "Oh, forgive me, Lord, / how human I've become, busy clicking / what I like, busy pushing / my cuticles back and back to expose / all ten pale, useless moons."

from Wild Thing: "Put another way, I was almost / on empty, and though no one / believed it or cared to see, I was just another / animal, and like all animals / desired, we would suffer."

from Self-Portrait as Land Snail: "Tired of being / a leaking receptacle for a man's desire, / I needed to feel / an equal's push against my own, / a willingness to be wounded and to / wound, receiving and giving at the same // time."

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely beautiful homage to animals...and to our relationship with them, our bond, our dependence, and our brutality toward them. Nickole speaks for the animals who cannot speak for themselves and cannot plead for mercy themselves. She pleads for them. This is an exquisite love song, but also a sad, unforgettable collection. I loved this chapbook.

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, potent, and honest work. Goes right to the heart without forgetting the world outside it—it does seem like Brown’s heart is tied with the thinnest string to every living being in the world.

[Bill DeGenaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't get this stanza out of my mind (not that I want to):

Hope, you know by now,
is not a thing you feel
but something you do,
and this is your job. It's what
you do; it's what needs to be
done.

[Emma Filtness · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another beautiful chapbook from Rattle exploring the complex relationship between human and animal, and human as animal. This intense and timely collection urges beasts to speak, to cry mercy.

[Alicia Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the yes.

[Elizabeth S · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous tribute to the animals with whom we share our planet—and a plea for us to remember that they have a right to be here. This is a chapbook to be reread and shared.

[Kali · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book feels like a passionate conversation with a fine poet who has thought deeply about herself as animal, and our relationships with animals.

[Wendy L. Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could read Nickole Brown’s words all day, every day. ❤️

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devastating.

As it should be.

[Luanne Castle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This chapbook burst me open. It stole my heart in its teeth and ran into the woods with it. When I finished the last poem I knew I was changed.
These poems are the definitive source for poetry about what it means to "turn and live with the animals" in the sense that the animals are inside our hearts.
In case it's not clear, I LOVE these poems.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites read in 2019:
https://hollograms.blogspot.com/2020/...