Two Brown Dots

by Danni Quintos, Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Foreword by)

Overview

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 Dots explores 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 kid—watching Dirty Dancing at sleepovers, borrowing eye shadow out of a friend’s caboodle, crushing on a boy wearing khaki shorts to Sunday mass—while 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 Dots subverts stereotypes to reclaim agency and pride in the realness and rawness and unprettyness of a brown girl’s body, boldly declaring: We exist, we belong, we are from here, and we will continue to be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950774517
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Series:	New Poets of America , #46
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Danni Quintos is the author of Two Brown Dots (BOA, 2022), which won the 20th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She is also the author of PYTHON (Argus House, 2017), an ekphrastic chapbook featuring photography by her sister, Shelli Quintos. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Cream City Review, Day One, Pluck!, Salon, and elsewhere. Her knitting has appeared on the shoulders and heads of many writers and artists, who are also friends and teachers. She received her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. A Kentuckian, a mom, an educator, and an Affrilachian Poet, Quintos lives in Lexington, KY.

Table of Contents

Foreword Aimee Nezhukumatathil 9

I Girlhood

Portrait of My Dad Through a Tent Window 13

Unbreak My Heart 14

On Being Asked to Represent Your Country 17

When Clothes Make You Cousins 19

Scary Spice 20

Crush Spell by a Fifth-Grade Witch 21

Cross Your Forehead, Mouth, & Heart 22

Age Eleven 24

Letter to My Childhood Crush 28

The Rules 29

Brown Girls 30

Sixth-Grade Invisibility Studies 32

Who I Wanted to Be Instead 34

Unpretty 35

Boobs 37

What Girls Learn 38

The Worst Part of Riding the Bus 39

Mispronunciation 41

The Mix CD I Made When I Was Sixteen 42

Youth Group 43

Ode to Country Dips 45

Eighteen 46

II Motherhood

Trying 49

Luteal Phase Ends 50

The Eighth Month 51

First Milk 54

Breastfeeding 55

Breast Lump 57

Naptime Haibun 59

Breast Pain 60

Pandemic Fall Haibun 61

Something from Nothing 62

Letters to Imelda Marcos 63

III Folklore

Milkfish 71

1991 and We Flew for Days 72

Pond's White Beauty 73

Self-Portrait as Manananggal 75

All Filipina Women Are Beautiful 76

Your English Is Good 78

Ghazal for Dogeaters 79

Five Hundred Years & Three Weeks Ago We Killed Magellan 80

How the Filipino Got Their Stereotype 82

How to Resurrect a Chicken 83

Cousin Dives Has More, This Time in Her Bowels 84

Where Good People Live 85

Eggplant 86

How My Dad Started Smoking 87

1991 and I Ride to Church 88

Quintos 89

The Oil Painting That Hangs on My Lola's Wall 90

Rosa De Rosario, 1929 91

Possible Reasons My Dad Won't Return to the Philippines 92

Python 94

Notes 97

Acknowledgments 99

About the Author 101

Colophon 104

Editorial Reviews

02/21/2022

The debut from Quintos explores with humor and vulnerability the immigrant Asian American experience of growing up in Kentucky and navigating American culture. Quintos begins in childhood, blending cultural touchstones of the '90s, "flashlight-reading/ the CD booklet/ to Jagged Little Pill," with religious rituals of Sunday mass and confession. There is a wide-eyed awareness running throughout that elevates life's ordinary moments into something transcendent and powerful. As the poems progress, so too does a sense of the emptiness at the heart of American life: "I confessed sins in a wooden phone booth/ without a phone." These poems grow in scope and theme, attempting to make sense of an assimilationist world: "What else can I do but try/ & keep this body satisfied." This act of questioning turns to wonder at the onset of motherhood: "Oh body, how/ you keep on making." Love and tenderness are placed alongside anger at consistently attempting to subvert stereotypes, to "stand on legs/ like immovable trees." Throughout, Quintos never forgets her family, "their names so full of poetry." At its core, this strong collection aches with longing for a more compassionate and accountable world. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

With remarkable humor and candor, Danni Quintos blazes across these pages in a most magical debut. You'll be utterly charmed and entranced by her poems, which ignite questions of desire and justice rarely offered– unless one amalgamates folklore and childhood in such a brilliantly expansive, moving way. This is it. This is the one you were waiting for.”
— Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments

“Who but the Filipina girl, the keen discerning granddaughter of lola, with the unquiet mind, could turn the hurt and brutality, the invisibility of coming of age in late 20th century America, into an iridescent book of modern day brown girl psalms.”
— Nikky Finney, author of Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts

“Danni Quintos’s book Two Brown Dots, in addition to thinking hard about motherhood, the body, ancestry, and more, is one of the most beautiful and tender and honest depictions of the youthful negotiations of racism I’ve ever read: the lostness, the entanglements, the confusions, the hurts, the loves.  How many times I gasped or dropped my head into my hands or shook my head in recognition at how clearly, how precisely, she depicted what I have felt but never quite had the words or courage to say.  It is a wonder how poems can care for us like that. It is a mercy.”
— Ross Gay, author of Be Holding

 

From the Publisher