Poetry. "Using umbilicus as guide rail, the speaker of Nickole Brown's SISTER - an unflinching and deeply intelligent first book - undertake a hair-lifting expedition back to her childhood so as to return herself to the arms of a younger sister both long neglected and longed for. Proving that narrative and lyric are never mutually exclusive, Brown pulls the reader down the rain-swollen rush of river where her past gurgles with the 'sound of diesel,' to revel the pedophile - 'a man who simply // cannot stop.' These poems, always stunning in their clairvoyance, advise us to take such experience and 'simply / bury it, but bury it / alive.' I cannot imagine a world in which one could read this book and not experience the confluence of dismay and wonder" - Cate Marvin