Sister

Brown's forthright debut opens with an intimate address to a sister: “I tell you this story because it is/ the story we need/ to believe our offal is divine.” The poems that follow fuse together the speaker's harrowing history: her birth to an unwed teen, a stepfather's abuse and her teenage escape in a car packed with all her belongings and half a tank of gas. Despite its excesses and reliance on the well-worn imagery of a dusty and impoverished South, this is a striking collection. The strongest poems are those stripped of commentary, in which rough memories are offered as strange discoveries, as in “Jessica Meyers in the Corn”: “In puddles of seeping/ groundwater, I plugged in electrical cords and her skin/ burned black.” These brave confessions, apologies and recollections lay everything bare: “I want nothing/ but truth between us, but I am afraid.” (Sept.)