Description

BOA Editions, paperback

Publication Date: April 12, 2022

Publisher Marketing:Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Danni Quintos carves a space for brown girls and weird girls in her debut collection of poems.

Two Brown Dotsexplores what it means to be a racially ambiguous, multiethnic, Asian American woman growing up in Kentucky. In stark, honest poems, Quintos recounts the messiness and confusion of being a typical 90s kidwatchingDirty Dancingat sleepovers, borrowing eye shadow out of a friends caboodle, crushing on a boy wearing khaki shorts to Sunday masswhile navigating the microagressions of the neighbor kids, the awkwardness of puberty, and the casual cruelties of fellow teenagers. The mixed-race daughter of a dark skinned Filipino immigrant, Quintos retells family stories and Phillipine folklore to try and make sense of an identity with roots on opposite sides of the globe.

With clear-eyed candor and a wry sense of humor, Quintos teases the line between tokenism and representation, between assimilation and belonging, offering a potent antidote to the assumption that American means white. Encompassing a whole journey from girlhood to motherhood,Two Brown Dotssubverts stereotypes to reclaim agency and pride in the realness and rawness andunprettyness of a brown girls body, boldly declaring: We exist, we belong, we are from here, and we will continue to be.