Miss August

Critic Reviews

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