American Poet: The Journal of The Academy of American Poets

"Nickole Brown's poems marry an enthralling and tormented narrative with woven, specific lyricism to create a layered progression through a difficult past. Brown has immediate access to how the situations she evokes are processed by the mind of a child and can re-create that open and immediate seeing. . . . The aim here is not retribution, but getting it right. The speaker's addresses to her sister, which are spoken even before the sister has been born, and then as she grows toward the present, shape the book as a lesson in understanding how little one can understand about this world. However, the struggle for reason, even science, is beautifully wrought in Brown's hand."