"To write of one's own conception, gestation, birth"to write convincingly of unknowable-yet-familiar moments: that is the power of poetry and the power of Nickole Brown's debut, Sister, a self-styled "novel-in-poems.' . . . It would be difficult for the book to flee the inevitable baggage of the Southern Gothic, yet it walks that high wire gracefully and never lapses into stereotype. . . . Sister is in no way limited; it does not limit its subjects, its language, its experiments with form, or its audience."