Miss August

In her latest collection, Miss August, Nin Andrews takes on difficult topics: racism, segregation, child abuse, mental illness, and sexual identity. Told from the point of view of three different characters, the poems take place in a small southern town in the Jim Crow South where opposition to racial integration is still strong. The book presents a tale of a boy’s discovery of his sexual identity, of profound love and friendship, and is also a portrait of racism in a specific time and place in American history.

Nin Andrews grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. Her poems and stories have a appeared in my literary journals and anthologies including Agni, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of many books including The Book of Orgasms, Southern Comfort, and Why God Is a Woman.

In Miss August, Nin Andrews reminds us that poets tell the terrible stories, the ones we’d much rather ignore or sweep under the rug. Nin doesn’t shy away from past. In this extraordinary book of prose poems, she is at her best, opening the door to childhood to examine life in the desegregated South in the late ‘50’s. Her poems—about race, class, childhood, place—are complicated, never simple, but always engaging, always coming from a place of love. As Nin says, “racism is like arsenic—you can become de-sensitized to it when you’ve sipped it over time.” Here there is black, white, and every shade of gray in between. Here Nin shines a light on a difficult time our collective history.
– January Gill O’Neil

In intimate, braided lyrics, one of America’s premier prose poets delves beneath the surface of a southern childhood in the late 50’s and early 1960’s with its sweet tea, manicured lawns, and thoroughbred horses to release “a dark scream” of racism and class division. The child-speakers of Miss August grope through strange yet achingly familiar landscapes, coming to grips with gray ghosts and unparsed truths, terrible forgetting and toxic remembering which comprise the tragic legacy of “The War of Northern Aggression.” With incisive wit and deep compassion, Nin Andrews demonstrates once again that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” Now more than ever, Miss August is a book we need.
– Philip Brady

May 2017
128 pp
Trade paper – 8.5 X 8.5
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-62-4