2021 National Poetry Series Winner No’u Revilla

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to recognize and promote excellence in contemporary poetry by ensuring the publication of five books of poetry annually through participating publishers. In addition, the National Poetry Series has partnered with Miami Book Fair to award the Paz Prize in Poetry, which ensures bilingual publication for a book of poems written in Spanish. This conversation features No’u Revilla on Ask the Brindled: Poems, speaking with the judge who selected her manuscript, Rick Barot, The Galleons: Poems. In this debut collection, Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, mo’o, ma’i. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red – for desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawai’i with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes toward sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, civic. Through the medium of formal dynamism and the material of ’Ōiwi culture and mythos, this living decolonial text both condemns and creates. With a special introduction by Daniel Halpern, founder of HarperCollins imprint Ecco and the National Poetry Series.

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