Miss August by Nin Andrews’ was recently reviewed by Dante Di Stefano. Dante’s poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner to name a few.
Read the review below.
Nin Andrews’ newest collection, Miss August, provides further evidence that she is perhaps the most agile practitioner of prose poetry writing today. Written from the alternating perspective of three characters, Sarah Jane Lee, Gil Rhett Simmons, and May Dee, Miss August chronicles the connections that these characters forge at Chinquapin Hill Farm in Lessington, Virginia during the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Andrews nimbly shifts between registers and dialects as she moves between the three characters, rendering a lyrical, but plain-spoken and arresting, version of three mid-twentieth century southern voices. The South that Andrews evokes obsessively confronts the legacy of what the locals call, “The War of Northern Aggression,” while denying the full truth of the foundational sin of slavery and the continuous transgressions of Jim Crow. In Lessington, the ghosts all wear confederate gray and “raspberry blight got blamed on General Sherman and the burning of the South.” Miss August ably addresses issues of racial discrimination, child abuse, mental illness, gender inequity, sexual identity, and class differences, in a coming-of-age story that resonates even more deeply in 2017 as the open wounds caused by misogyny and white supremacy continue to suppurate.
Head over to blog.bestamericanpoetry.com for the full review here.
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