To Those Who Were Our First Gods

Winner of the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize
2018 Finalist for the Julie Suk Award
2020 Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award

ISBN: 978-1-931307-39-0 / December 2018
$6.00 | 6 x 9” Paperback; 48 Pages
Purchase from Rattle

What Readers & Reviewers Have to Say About To Those Who Were Our First Gods

From the publisher: For 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.

"The strip mall pet store and the dollar store parking lot, in Nickole Brown’s wild and embracing poems, are reclaimed as places to discover a connection to our animal cousins. These are not quiet poems, they ring with aint’s and damn's, with hair spray, shit, and the deep rhythms of Biblical speech sung through Appalachia ('If you will, Lord, make me the teeth / hot in the mouth of a raccoon scraping / the junk I scraped from last night’s plates'). With clear-eyed, scientifically accurate praise, they even reclaim Romanticism’s problematic yen toward personification, showing us how, if done with an awareness of self and how we cloud our own viewing, it can be a way to forge a connection with the wood rat, the parasite-riddled goat, the moth. Brown’s poems are full of play, but don’t overlook the keen mind at work here. She is tearing down the 'here for our use' capitalistic and patriarchal relationship to animals humanity has used since time immemorial. As she writes in her long poem about the Biblical Samson, 'Because there’s a better way to solve this, / and the answer is no longer fear / curdled into rage, a murdered / lion with a swarm sugaring his remains.' If we follow her, we could do better by animals and we just might save ourselves, too."

—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Approaching Ice and Once Removed

"Nickole Brown creates a new language for our relationships with non-human animals. Her poems are founded on fully embodied listening and yield insights that unify mind, body, and emotions. At a time when such inner and outer connections are too often severed, her poems show us the possibility of wholeness."

—David George Haskell, author of The Songs of Trees and the Pulitzer-finalist The Forest Unseen

"Brown is a savior of wild creatures, a lover of animals, an angel in waiting, a rescuer, a story teller."

—Washington Independent Review of Books (January 2019 Examplars, Grace Cavalieri)

"Nickole Brown's To Those Who Were Our First Gods explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. In language both colloquial and lyrically charged, Brown examines how predation and kindness play out on 'this whole stubborn, / beautiful, fucked-up planet,' which is spinning toward ecological doom, pocked (at least, in America) by chain-stores and fostering 'this clocked-in, bottled, florescent-lit existence.' . . . To Those Who Were Our First Gods focuses on more than what we've lost by estranging oursevles from the natural world; it upholds and elegizes 'that iridescent song,' 'the soft and liquid cathedral' of the animal's body, which, more often than not, ends up wrapped in a black bag and thrown away. Reading Brown's poetry reminds one that to be an animal is to be alive in desire and suffering."

—Dante di Stefano, The Best American Poetry blog

"To Those Who Were Our First Gods is dedicated to a three-legged sheep called Gulliver. To see eye to eye with a sheep, one must get on their knees; these poems kneel to the reality of the Anthropocene. Neither an 'ecopoet,' whose language might become all but incomprehensible, distorting in concert with a ravaged world, nor a 'nature poet,' who might reflect on the world as being of distance, an exceptionalized place of awe and exceptional untouchability, Brown is a poet of presence, participation, communion and communication. To Those Who Were Our First Gods feels committed to being—what some regard as a great poetry sin, (gasp!)—accessible. Language here is porch-stoop and diner and parking lot colloquial, a kind of poetry that does not risk losing the reader's attention or identification by employing unconventional language or form. There is too much at stake in these poems to risk not speaking simply. . . . The poems stand shouting, singing, from the center of this history of willful ignorance, this deeply engrained system of cruelty. And the voice shouting is that of a queer woman, a marginalized voice that both sings her own natural history and begs—repeatedly—for animals to speak in a language humans can understand."

—Sophie Klahr, Quarterly West

"When I received my copy of To Those Who Were Our First Gods, I sat down on the couch intending—as I usually do with a book of poetry—to spot-read one or two poems then put it down for another time. But within a few stanzas, I became immersed and read the whole thing. I really love these poems, and I'm moved by them. Nickole Brown expresses so well, and uniquely, the feelings of alienation and frustration we 'animal people' feel. Tiffany Bozic's stunning cover art is the perfect accompaniment to her powerful words. I hope this chapbook gets read widely."

—Jonathan Balcombe, author of the New York Times best-seller, What A Fish Knows

"'Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect, humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.' Milan Kundera wrote those words, and Nickole Brown's poetry lives them. As though the whole world is sewn of teeth and tongue and sound from the animal kingdom, each poem in this collection resonates with the deadly accuracy of a boomerang to mankind's confusion and jealously of sharing, caring about our fellow beings and indeed the earth itself. Mercy, a word to begin again. This poet truly gives voice to the Voiceless."

—Jenny Bates, author of Visitations and Opening Doors: An Equilog of Poetry About Donkeys

"Nickole Brown’s chapbook addresses animals with Brown’s characteristic sharp language, Southern aphorisms, and tart observations. . . . The animals of Brown’s ark are abandoned, feral, needy. Like George’s livestock on the farm, Brown’s animals occupy a world transformed by humans. These transformations benefit some animals and harm others, a metaphor for our struggle with catastrophic climate change. . . . Brown finds divinity and hope in human actions to heal the world, but the road to hope is dark and complicated. . . . This echoes one of my beliefs about lesbian poets: they do the work that needs to be done. They speak what needs to be spoken. They write what needs to be written. Then, they share it with the world, with those listening, with those interested, in every way they can: in print, online, in small journals, in handmade books. It’s what needs to be done."

—Julie Enszer, The Rumpus

"With this work, Nickole Brown has moved from subjects long known—her sister and grandmother, her Southern upbringing—to a terriftory she was warned against when she was growing up, that of the animal and wild. . . . It was not until she immersed herself in the sweaty, smelly, mucky, heart-wrenching, yet rewarding work of volunteering at animal sanctuaries and a wildlife rehabilitation center that these poems surfaced. I suspect that an earlier Nickole Brown, before coming into her sexual identity and fully into her own body—gifted poet though she already was—would not have written these poems with the same intensity she achives in To Those Who Were Our First Gods. I'm glad she wrote this chapbook when she did and can't wait to read her related essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies—and whatever comes next."

—Wendy DeGroat, The Poetry Cafe

"“Nickole Brown hasn’t yet published a third book, but, taken together, two recent chapbooks, To Those Who Were Our First Gods and The Donkey Elegies, are the equivalent of a full-length collection in page count and accomplishment. In both collections, animals animate her imagination (she’s a volunteer at multiple sanctuaries), but Brown never loses sight of the human animal that she and we are—nor of the transactional exchanges that occur between ours and other species, usually to their detriment. . . . Both chapbooks are conceived as belonging to a longer bestiary-in-progress whose final incarnation in print I eagerly await.”

—Ned Balbo, Literary Matters

"These poems are full of compassion, which dissolves the usual human-animal hierachy. 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."

—Allison Wilkins, author of Girl Who

"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 appreciat how long the poems are—in a 44-page chapbook, only 9 poems in several sections."

—Erinn Batykefer, author of Allegheny, Monongahela

Brief interview & mention in The Laurel of Asheville, Spring 2019