Full Description
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 reads 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. "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 paints 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
Contents
Table of Contents
For Our Grandmothers
I
Fuck
Your Monthly
Fanny Says She and Her Husband Had Their First Fight
Fanny Linguistics: Malapropisms
Fanny Says She Spent It
Pepsi
Fanny Says Sometimes It's Worth the Whupping
Go Put on Your Face
For My Grandmother's Teeth, Pulled When She Was Thirty-Six
Fanny Says She Got Saved
Fanny Linguistics: Nickole
Fanny Says How to Make Potato Salad
Fanny Linguistics: Superstition
The Dead
Fanny Linguistics: Birdsong
Fanny Says She Learned to Throw the First Stone
Hettie
Fanny Says How to Be a Lady
II
Clorox
Fanny Says She Didn't Use to Be Afraid
Fanny Linguistics: Publix Hieroglyphics
Fanny Linguistics: Origins
Crisco
For My Grandmother's Feet, Swollen Again
Fanny Says How to Tend Babies
Fanny Says She Wanted To See Elvis
EPO
Fanny Says at Twenty-three She Learned to Drive
Dixie Highway
Fanny Linguistics: How to Say What You Mean
Pheno
Fanny Says She Made Him Feel Better
How To Dress Like Fanny
Fanny Says I Need to Keep Warm
III
A Genealogy of The Word
IV
Fanny Says She Knows How Little Time is Left
For My Grandmother's Gallstones, Reconsidered
Sweet Silver
Fanny Says She Meets a Stripper in the ER
Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit
Fanny Says Again the Same Dream on Morphine
Flitter
Fanny Asks Me a Question Before I'd Even Ask Myself
My Book, In Birds
A Translation for the Spiritual Mediator Who May Speak for Me to Frances Lee Cox, Wherever She May Be
To My Grandmother's Ghost, Flying with Me on a Plane
Fanny Linguistics: Thaumatology
The Family Says It Celebrates Independence
An Invitation for My Grandmother
A Prayer for the Self-Made Man
For My Grandmother's Perfume, Norell
Fanny Says Goodbye
Afterword
