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.ampamp10ampamp10Two 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 ampamp821690s kidwatching Dirty Dancing at sleepovers borrowing eye shadow out of a friends caboodle crushing on a boy wearing khaki shorts to Sunday massampamp8212while navigating the microagressions of the neighbor kids the awkwardness of puberty and the casual cruelties of fellow teenagers. The mixedrace 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.ampamp10ampamp10With cleareyed 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 ampamp8220white.ampamp8221 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 girlampamp8217s body boldly declaring We exist we belong we are from here and we will continue to be.