Miss August
Nin Andrews
CavanKerry Press, 2017
Nin Andrews’ newest collection, Miss August, provides further evidence that she is perhaps the most agile practitioner of prose poetry writing today. Written from the alternating perspective of three characters, Sarah Jane Lee, Gil Rhett Simmons, and May Dee, Miss August chronicles the connections that these characters forge at Chinquapin Hill Farm in Lessington, Virginia during the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Andrews nimbly shifts between registers and dialects as she moves between the three characters, rendering a lyrical, but plain-spoken and arresting, version of three mid-twentieth century southern voices. The South that Andrews evokes obsessively confronts the legacy of what the locals call, “The War of Northern Aggression,” while denying the full truth of the foundational sin of slavery and the continuous transgressions of Jim Crow. In Lessington, the ghosts all wear confederate gray and “raspberry blight got blamed on General Sherman and the burning of the South.” Miss August ably addresses issues of racial discrimination, child abuse, mental illness, gender inequity, sexual identity, and class differences, in a coming-of-age story that resonates even more deeply in 2017 as the open wounds caused by misogyny and white supremacy continue to suppurate.
Andrews explores how her characters’ lives are circumscribed and poisoned by the racist southern worldview that surrounds them. When Sarah Jane asks Gil’s father, Mr. Simmons, an abusive, manipulative, philandering, alcoholic, whose family bloodline “traced back to the Order of the First Families of Virginia,” about lynching, he replies: “You know they only lynched criminals, Sarah Jane. Some white folks were lynched, too. The way I see it: Lynching is a whole lot cheaper than the electric chair. And quicker too.” Mr. Simmons embodies a type of witless equivocation that continues to perpetuate white supremacy on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line in the twenty-first century. Running counter to Mr. Simmons, and all that he represents, are the countless silken ties of affection that Andrews draws between Sarah Jane, Gil, and May Dee; these characters are powerless in Lessington: an illegitimate daughter, a boy struggling with his gender identity, and an African-American servant. The care that these characters show each other mitigates the indignities they suffer. As they gallop across the alien landscapes of the stories they tell each other, they dream of planets where everyone is “destined to be an angel”; as Gil puts it: “At night we slept on our bellies so our wings could grow.” Miss August allows us access to the interior lives of three fully realized characters, who, much like many of us, strive to see past the hummingbird into the honeysuckle bloom. Nin Andrews’ Miss August is a must-read examination of the ways personal and collective histories perpetually rewrite the present.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.
Excellent piece. Thank you. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | October 16, 2017 at 11:52 PM