The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems
Release date: January 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-943977-71-0 / January 2020
$12.00 | 6 x 9” Paperback; 38 Pages
Pre-Order from Sibling Rivalry Press
Cover Art by Tiffany Bozic
Honorable Mention, Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize of The New England Poetry Club, selected by José Edmundo Reyes
What Readers & Reviewers Have to Say About The Donkey Elegies
From the publisher:The Donkey Elegies closely examines an animal’s history, tracing how one species hauled the stones that built our civilizations, plowed the fields that fed generations, and carted soldiers and weapons from war to war. The poems undo the brunt end of every lewd joke and unearth the sacred origins of a creature we rarely consider except as melancholy cartoon or dumb, stubborn brute. In these twenty-five linked pieces, a truth is made real: that we must cherish each living thing, each animal, each human being for all their worth.
“We no longer live lives close to those necessary others who are here with us, the animals, and so there is in us a great lack—of wisdom, of empathy, of attention. For this, Nickole Brown's book-length poem The Donkey Elegies might well be first remedy. With great wisdom and empathy, and with exquisite attention to history, culture, language, gender, memory, and the beautiful, weary world about us, Brown allows us to truly see and for a blessed moment be with that most humble of beasts, and in so doing she challenges us to turn to the holinesses in our own worlds, to hold them close—closer yet.”
—Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and When We Were Birds
“In The Donkey Elegies, Nickole Brown sets out to cleanse our wounded sight, nourish our withered assumptions, and crack open the narrow cage of our souls. By restoring dignity to our misunderstood kin, she asks us to explore along with her the origins of humans’ self-serving stories and reflect on the ways clichés of language and thought perpetuate violence and diminishment. True seeing, addressing occlusions of one’s own moral sight, requires a concerted vulnerability on the part of the writer, and here, Brown’s gorgeous language is infused with radical tenderness, authentic surprise, and restless curiosity. As acts of rescue, reclamation, and repair, her poems serve as extended heart-songs to all of us, and especially to the least of us.”
—Lia Purpura, author of All The Fierce Tethers and Rough Likeness
“The Donkey Elegies is an extraordinary sequence. . . . This is a book that opens and expands our capacity to notice, attend, imagine the 'other,' and then readjust our thoughts and emotions accordingly. Much pain here, and much redeeming love for the human and more-than-human."
—David George Haskell, author of The Songs of Trees and the Pulitzer-finalist The Forest Unseen
"As promised by the motto of Sibling Rivalry Press: I am at once—consistently, progressively, unrelentingly—disturbed and enraptured by these poems. . . . This is a small book of remarkable potency. . . . Sometimes my students ask me if making art actually “counts” as doing something, giving something back. Does art actually help anyone, they want to know. (Yes! I insist.) Can art be a form of activism? (Yes! I assure.) And sometimes art can help specific people/creatures in explicit, tangible ways. For instance, this note at the bottom of Nickole Brown’s Acknowledgments page: 'All proceeds from this book will go to the animal rehabs and sanctuaries mentioned here.' You have already contributed something, just by buying this book."
—Julie Marie Wade, Lambda Literary
"Reader, I will admit, I never really thought too much about donkeys, have you? This is a book about donkeys. And this is an entire book about donkeys (okay, a chapbook, just thirty-three pages, but still!) . . . Perhaps if you are the type of person who believes in the inherent beauty and nobility and sentience and grace of all living beings you will already have understood the ways these traits are alive in the eyes and the ears and the flanks and the hooves and the souls of the donkey, but if you did not, Brown’s donkeys will present a new way of seeing to you. At one point in this collection, Brown asks, ‘Do we dismiss sturdy useful beings because we despise what we’re afraid we’ll become?’ and there, as in other places, she leaps into a world of simile and metaphor that almost makes me dizzy as I watch her connect this to that and the other to me. (It’s okay if you have to go back and track the logic of that sentence. Take your time.) But I don’t get dizzy or lose my place or feel left out of these poems because Brown is ever welcoming and ever patient and ever graceful and forthright and honest and clear. This is a book about donkeys, yes, and you will quickly learn as you enter its pages, donkeys are and always have meant just about everything."
—Camille Dungy, Orion Magazine
"The Donkey Elegies does what any good essay does: it assays (it tests and examines, but it also attempts), it suggest (rather than expounds), it spirals outward while tethering the attention to one unparaphrasable idea; the essay, as form or genre, is, after all, the donkey of literature: sinewy, indefatiagable, often overlooked. Like her central subject in this book, Brown's poetry hauls steadily onward, tender and tough, lit with the knowledge that holiness dwells in the common, the low-life, the baseborn. . . . Nickole Brown's poetry does what all truly great poetry does: it reminds us that we are always on the brink and that there is so much to save as we skitter on the edge of an incremental apocalypse. The Donkey Elegies reafferims a truth we know in every molecule of our animal-selves: to like like the donkey is to live in a Dickinsonian Forever composed of Nows. Buy this book, send a copy to a friend; it is a balm in uncertain times, a book of great, enduring, lyric power and imagination."
—Dante DeStefano, Best American Poetry
"The contrast between the lush richness of {her} language and the lowliness of donkeys straddles an interesting frontier; teasing out our arrogance, it invites us to consider where in our own language we dismiss what is present, and toward what ends. . . . The Donkey Elegies joins a growing list of books that work to revise our hierachical narratives with the natural world. But these Elegies break new grown within the environmental literature genre in locating our problem not in one particular issue, but in our habits of discourse, revealing how the origins of prejudice and bigotry often begin in language. As Brown says, it 'is not the animal itself but the animal / they see, not the animal they know / but the animal they think."
—Barbara Roether, Rain Taxi Review of Books
"With The Donkey Elegies, Brown weaves secular with numinous, agrarian with militaristic, and sublime with vulgar to create a tapestry of healing and exultation. . . . Each section is a profound exploration of our intertwined need and cruelty, and our penchant for taking others for granted. Whether the speaker mucks out stalls and is judged for it, or speaks of the crude jokes men tell in a bar, or tours the carnage of wars and brutality, or even recalls abuses to the self and abusing others, Nickole Brown’s work shares in the suffering and strength of a long overlooked and often forgotten creature. To be recognized as one of the speaker’s kin, so to speak, is a type of discernment that reveals not just a great sensitivity to 'that beautiful, necessary, / weary donkey(,)' but also an eloquent confession of personal identity. Indeed, the speaker, in describing the donkey’s ears, notices, 'Your other ear—blessed as I am—rotates towards me.' And what a blessing it is, one of curiosity and almost of trust, to find, '…only now / can I reclaim / what I didn’t even know / was missing and there / find myself.' The rest of us are blessed by these poems."
—David B. Prather, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts
"Having written Sister, a novel-in-poems, and Fanny Says, a biography-in-poems, it's no surprise that Brown is also author of an essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies. Comprised of prose poems that fuse lyric and discursive elements, each of twenty-five numbered elegies explors some aspect of the humble beast—its history, biology, cultural resonance, and more—as well as Brown's own empathy, deepened and informed by her animal caretaking experience. . . . The Donkey Elegies reminds us that humans and wildlife are inextricably linked in ways that will keep unfolding long after the present day, even as humans continue to threaten nature itself."
—Ned Balbo, Literary Matters
"Nickole Brown’s The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) broke my heart and then sewed it back together again with threads of animal kinship. Amidst necessary talk of human rights in a cruel and chaotic time, Brown gives visibility and voice to an age-old beast of burden that many of society’s outcasts can relate to. Mythically, donkeys have been present at humanity’s lynchpin moments: most notably, to carry a savior to his birth and, ultimately, to his death. Throughout history, they have pulled our loads and taken our beatings. And now, when they are no longer needed, they have been, in large part, abandoned, a barnyard anachronism. Brown’s writing both slays and soothes. It will send you into a pasture in search of a donkey."
—Kelly Barth, Book Marks
"The language throughout the book links the poet and the donkeys to hardscrabble working worlds: 'The truth of my family was buried in their talk.' In one poem Brown describes Mary as 'tupped by the Almighty,' in another she refers to Pooh’s donkey friend Eeyore as a 'stitched-back-together low note of Prozac.' In tone, these rich phrases are the offspring of the country sayings she grew up with, such as one she quotes in poem #14: 'about as good as putting a steering wheel on a mule.' My own father, a Western Pennsylvania farm kid whose education ended when he dropped out of high school to work in a steel mill, peppered his own speech with similar talk. As cliched as it may sound, rural language is indeed wise, often poetic and has an earthy humor you can practically smell. Brown’s book is infused with this language, and coupled with her intellect and keen observations she spins plenty of her own wisdom: 'Do we dismiss sturdy, useful beings / because we despise what we’re afraid we’ll become?'"
—Suzanne Simmons, The Poetry Café
"A sense of wonder propels readers through The Donkey Elegies. One poem after another evokes donkeys, at once odd and familiar."
—Constance Alexander, Kentucky Forward
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