By Nickole Brown
Narrated By Nickole Brown
Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins
Release Date: 08-25-17
Print Pub: BOA Editions
Summary
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 feels 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.
FANNY SAYS
San Francisco Chronicle Best Poetry Book of 2015 Library Journal Best Book of 2015 NewPages Editor's Pick for 2015 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...
Praise
"Fanny Says may appear to be a collection comprised of four sections and fifty-three poems, but look closer. It is in essence one long poem—138 pages—chambered like a heart and pumping language like blood to every stanza throughout this single, vital organ."
—The Rumpus
“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 paint 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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nickole Brown grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and Deerfield Beach, Florida. Her debut collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition will be 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 the audio book of that collection will be available in late 2017. She graduated 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 she 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 was on faculty at the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Murray State, and the Writing Workshops in Greece. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years until deciding to write full time. Currently, she lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs. She teaches as part of UNCA's Great Smokies Writing Program each fall and will be on faculty at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program in the summer 2017.
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