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Such a strong debut! This is one of my favorites in my month of poetry reads. This book has stayed with me in the days since I read it, and it begs for a re-read.
Identity, family, popular culture, violence, love. All the elements in this book are great, very intense poems. Loved it!
Like the cover, colorful. Natalie Díaz does the imagery thing extremely well. It's a rich dish, this book, and her brother is metaphorically sacrificed, like so many young people these days, to drugs (in his case, meth, which I guess involves lightbulbs somehow). Family, the body, love, race, and a few other big honking themes included. Worth a look!
Truth is, there may be angels, but if there are angelsup there, living on clouds or sitting on thrones across the sea wearingvelvet robes and golden rings, drinking whiskey from silver cups,we're better off if they stay rich and fat and ugly and'xactly where they are—in their own distant heavens.You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they'll be marching you off toZion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they've mapped out for us. Some people just seem to live a lot of life; i
I can't recommend this collection enough. Imagery that will gut you and a seamless mix of traditions and mythologies, taking on the issues of family, identity, history, and suffering from the inside and not just as a spectator. "Why I hate raisins" is a better love poem than most that would call themselves that.
Spellbinding, meaty, frightening and beautiful. This first collection feels like it carries the weight of a life, illuminated and abiding. Diaz' poems do not spare us the bright stains of life's wounds, but they do not sink into despair. Rather, these are poems born of the magical and majestic art of healing. Highly recommended.
Black Magic BrotherMy brother’s shadow flutters from his shoulders, a magician’s cape.My personal charlatan glittering in woofle dust and loadedwith gimmicks and gaffs.A train of dirty cabooses, of once-beautiful girls,follows my magus man like a chewed tailhelping him perform his tricks.He calls them his Beloveds, his Sim Sala Bimbos, juggles them,shoves them into pipes packed hot hard as cannons and Wham BamAla-Kazam! whirls them to smoke.Sometimes he vanishes their teeth then points his broke...
An expansive debut collection of poems about family ties, queer romance, and Mojave life. Diaz writes plainspoken poetry that’s full of sharp wit and clear images, and she tackles head on a wide array of difficult subjects, from the emotional toll of a loved one’s addiction to the devastating effects of white supremacy. Well worth checking out.
This is one of my favourite all-time poetry collections, one I've read many times and often share poems from it with students. I love how Diaz combines the mythic with the sharp realities of her Mojave family life – uncomfortable but luxurious, vibrant and tragic, erotic and linguistically baroque. If I could give it ten stars I would. I can't wait for her next book and have seen samples published in various magazines that promise it will be even better.
When My Brother Was an Aztec is a debut poetry collection. The poems are vivid with language, family history, cultural struggle, and struggles in the body. Before I wrote this review, I spent almost an hour watching Natalie perform her poems and talk about her poems and life on YouTube. It was interesting to hear her talk about her work to help her people retain the Mojave language, and her family's reactions to her poems. She writes about her brother's meth addiction in particular, and its effe...
Genuinely some of the most impassioned, cutting, and intense writing I have experienced in years.
I have only three words: READ THIS BOOK.
Whew. The confidence in this poetry collection is impressive. The work here takes on race and identity and poverty and popular culture. There is also a lot of interesting commentary on the body, how it bleeds, how it fails, how it endures. A truly striking collection.
A book so lush it left me drunk. Serious, painful poems about the narrator's relationship with her drug-addicted brother. Poems of passion and longing. Poems riffing off works by Lorca and Rimbaud. A clever commentary on our paranoid post-9/11 world in which oranges become the new vehicles of evil. The power of red, the sensual attraction of apples. The knots of family love.These poems contain so much and examine with great intensity love that sometimes borders on hate, on feelings that seem to
Feverish, funny, serious, sensual poems. This collection has TEETH. Whether Díaz is writing about reservation life, her brother's drug addiction, or lovers' jealousy, she ties in themes of conquering and being conquered, of ecstasy and despair, of living the color red (internally and externally). And her phrasing regularly took my breath away. Perfect both for poetry lovers (who'll get more of the allusions than I did) and for those intimidated by poetry (like me).
This is one of the most exciting poetry collections I've read in a long time. The brutal honesty of these poems is what gets me. There are so many surprises. I found the poems concerning the brother and his relation to the family to be the most powerful/painful. I'll be reading this collection over and over.
My copy of this book is 75% highlighter now.
Diaz’s debut collection tackles big questions intelligently and sympathetically. While I found her more recent collection more powerful, the poems here detailing her family’s struggles with her brother’s drug addiction were very moving.
Natalie Diaz, ConjurerPoetry as turgid with metaphors, as disturbing, raw, and, a veces, humorous and sly and naughty doesn't happen often, but in this collection WHEN MY BROTHER WAS AN AZTEC Natalie Diaz manages to travel this bumpy terrain with such a sure hand that the result is staggering. Perhaps a part of the intensity of her writing is that as a woman born and raised on an Indian Reservation - and that, without parody intended, is why she writes like a necromancer, an augurer, a sorceress...
‘When My Brother Was an Aztec’ comes from an interesting place with Diaz growing up on a Mojave Indian reservation, having to dealing with her brother’s addiction, and suffering her lover’s jealousy, among other things. She lays her life bare with a brutal honesty. I liked the content, but didn’t really connect with the poetry. Glad I read it, though.