When My Brother Was an Aztec
A debut poetry collection that frames a brother’s addiction and family pain through mythic imagination and humor. Mojave memory collides with domestic reality.
Work Information
Family pain is lit by myth and humor.
Natalie Diaz uses verbal force and vivid imagery to bring personal history and communal memory into a single rhythm.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Copper Canyon Pr
- Published
- 2012-05-08
- Pages
- 103 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 1.02 x 22.61 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781556593833
- ISBN-10
- 155659383X
- Price
- 3115 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
"I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams. I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascia like pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones. The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stick against the lion's cage, calling out Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow! W ith one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt with fangs, the lion pulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars. The lion didn't want to do it He didn't want to eat the man like a piece of fruit and he told the crowd this: I only wanted some goddamn sleep . . . Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball for four years in Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University. She lives in Surprise, Arizona, and is working to preserve the Mojave language.
Natalie Diaz: Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. Having played professional basketball for four years in western Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University in 2007. She has received the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize and her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International, and North American Review. She lives in Surprise, Arizona.
Reviews
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Knockout poetry! Half way through it and already know it's going to be high up on my favourites list. Powerful. Beautiful.
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Natalie Diaz’s poetry collection works as a memorial for a brother long gone that consumes the family through his ravaging addiction. Diaz carefully places the weight of the hateful tropes imposed on Indigenous people as leverage for her to provide appropriate context to explain why this tropes exist in the first place. For instance, the speaker in the poems points towards the many causes of her brother’s addiction, but mainly she blames the settler state and society who do not know what to do with young Indigenous men. How can Indigenous youth thrive in a country that sees them as cheap labor to serve capitalism or as a weapon to feed the war machine? Diaz also portrays her stance on representation during the neoliberal era. Topics of gender, sexuality, and indigeneity are exposed brilliantly using the powerful craft of the poet to provide a perspective on Indigenous life, particularly that of the Mojave people, that antropolgists or sociologists will never be able to transmit. Diaz’s poems dismantle settler ideas to provide an alternative view of the world that is not entirely subjected to the binaries of the Western hegemony.
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some beautiful examples of imagery and poignant language that are definitely worth a read. every single poem was visceral and deep, clear and complex.
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no problems
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I needed this book for my college poetry course and it came in perfect condition a week before my classes started. It was more affordable on Amazon than in my college bookstore, and came right on time. As for the book contents, I am actually very intrigued by everything about it, from the title and cover, to the pages themselves. There are always great lessons and stories in poetry and I think this book captures that.