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.
