Letters to a Young Brown Girl

Barbara Jane Reyes answers the questions of Filipino American girls and young women of color with bold affirmations of hard-won empathy, fierce intelligence, and a fine-tuned B.S. detector.

The Brown Girl of these poems is fed up with being shushed, with being constantly told how foreign and unattractive and unwanted she is. Shes flipping tables and throwing chairs. Shes raising her voice. Shes keeping a sharp focus on the violences committed against her every day, and shes writing through the depths of her otherness to find beauty and even grace amidst her rage. Simultaneously looking into the mirror and out into the world, Reyes exposes the sensitive nerve-endings of life under patriarchy as a visible immigrant woman of color as she reaches towards her unflinching center.