I first heard Nickole Brown read her poetry at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2016. Nickole received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series, teaches periodically at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, and the Hindman Settlement School.
At the Dodge festival, Brown read from her 2015 collection, Fanny Says (BOA Editions) in which she lets the reader get to know her grandmother, Fanny, through poems written in her grandmother’s voice. I highly recommend that book.
Nickole lives near Asheville, NC, and volunteers at three animal sanctuaries near there. She is working on a series of chapbooks about the animals that she has been tending there. The first of these, To Those Who Were Our First Gods, won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize.
Her latest book focuses on the role of donkeys throughout human history. But it is much more than that. “The Donkey Elegies”, an essay in poems, is an ode to an animal Brown has come to love and admire. But it is also a warning about what humans do to themselves in the course of using and abusing animals. The book begins with a description of the ears of the animal. Among the 25 poems that make up this poetic essay are poems about the donkey as a beast of burden for many civilizations, its use during wars, and Christ’s ride on a donkey into Jerusalem before the trial and crucifixion. There is even a poem about Eeyore and other donkeys in popular culture. This book can be seen as a warning to all of us about our role in the natural world. I’ve included two of the poems below.
You can find out more about Nickole here: https://www.nickolebrown.com/about
Excerpts from The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems, by Nickole Brown
(published by Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020)
1.
Ears like sugar scoops. Ears like hands cupped to cradle a cool drink from the creek. Ears like single petals of dahlias—at full bloom, curled, firmly upright but always soft, always open.
Furred periscopes, one pivots to the wheezing scream of a squirrel above,
and I follow, hear as if for the first time that common arboreal cry neither chirp nor growl but something in between, like the caw of a mother blue jay stoked
behind the teeth of an old yard dog.
Your other ear—blessed as I am—rotates towards me.
Sweet apricots, velvet satellites, the twin souls
atop the head of every donkey.
13.
In the Kentucky that made me, long before I was born, coal was the darkness torn from the dark, and donkeys the color of cave fish and moonlight hauled the ore cars, a history told by a few black-and-white photos and those few men not yet dead from black lung. It meant nothing
to me—not the black coal or the white donkeys—not those worked-to-the-bone workers nor the glow of their tractable brutes, those donkeys ghosted deep underground so long they would emerge decades later
completely blind. Angry and young, I was ready to kill off any part of me that smacked of those hillbilly roots, and in a basement reeking of cat piss and strawberry wine, we did our best to blow apart
speakers with heavy metal cranked loud. We let a blindfold do its work before spinning ourselves round and round, swinging a bat until one of us hit what we were aiming for with a satisfactory thud, thrilled to hear all those plastic-wrapped candies hit the concrete floor. Little did we know we were acting out
our own trashy sort of morality play, what was really spilling from the split side of that white piñata, from that cheap paper-mache donkey.