“Noʻu’s performance lit fires through a spell-bound audience…If this event was billed as a book launch, then it might have inadvertently undersold itself as a community gathering….that special kind of hoʻi that one feels at momentous Hawaiian events—ones that feed us with more than food and invite us as we leave to be, eat, and, in this case, write better from then on.”
“Ask the Brindled reminded me of the power of poetry to reclaim and resist. Brimming with queer Indigenous brilliance, I fell in love with Revilla’s generous sharing of 'Ōiwi culture, cosmology, and history. It was a distinct pleasure to learn from this book.”
— Halee Kirkwood, Birchbark Books & Native Arts, Minneapolis, MN (2022)
Lúcia Leão, RHINO (2022)
“To read Ask the Brindled, by No’u Revilla, is to visit a shapeshifting dictionary….Erotic sovereignty is connected to aloha ʻāina (literally, “love of the land”), and the body is seen as a territory where experiments in freedom happen deep in the flesh. ”
Daniel T. O'Brien, Lambda Literary (2022)
“A hard lizard-skin makes up the casing of this collection. Throughout, Revilla is direct—these are poems of a queer Hawaiian woman, unafraid to look violence, colonization, and complex family relations squarely in the eye—and to articulate a life, a collection of lives, with care and poetic dexterity.”
Staff Pick at Powell’s Books
October 2022. Portland, Oregon. Mahalo, Terisa, for sharing the photo.
“You might think this poem is a tidy back-and-forth between past and present feminisms, but the rope that stiffens between your legs while you read, that rope carries you in and out of conventional temporality, like the seeking tongue of a lover in dreams and waking life.”
— Shivanee Ramlochan, Novel Niche (2018)
“If we unravel the central “character” of this poem, we find something astonishing that contains multitudes: a creature in a dress, a cliff who used to be a lizard, in a girl’s body, in a dress, with a kingdom inside her.”
— Caroline Hagood, Kenyon Review (2018)
“Noʻu Revilla mesmerizes want with “Rope/Tongue,” lingual glory, all the while bringing us to feed the feminine ethological home.”
— Allison Adele Hedge Coke, Kore Press Poem of the Week (2016)