When My Brother Was an Aztec

June 25, 2012
In her debut, Diaz portrays experiences rooted in Native American life with personal and mythic power. The poems are narrative and surreal—bodies are wracked by addiction and diabetes, but sometimes “a gunnysack full of tigers wrestles in our chests.” In the book’s first section, stories of reservation life are layered with history and culture. A basketball prodigy ends up selling tortillas from her car; government-issued food leaves those who eat it hungry. We learn how a “tongue will wrestle its mouth to death and lose—/ language is a cemetery.” The third section presents a mix of tactile love poems focused on the female body—“the door of your hip opening/to a room of light”—and others about global politics. Most striking, however, are the poems of the middle section, which figure and refigure a meth-addicted brother whose “shadow flutters from his shoulders, a magician’s cape” as he becomes a character in a series of myths.

May 1, 2012
In her debut collection, Diaz fuses Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian legend with a personal history of reservation life, its quirky idiosyncrasies and overwhelming ruin, to forge a Mojave-Aztec poetic genealogy. In poems of brutal casting and unrepentant brilliance, Diaz commands winding lines of red geography, desert rocks, deep cenotes, cacti, camouflage, and the purple eyelets of peacocks' fanned plumage. She peoples this landscape with reservation characters, including Guy No-Horse and diabetic, legless Lona, as well as Rimbaud, Borges, Lorca, Tonto (in the guise of an entitled white neighbor's Halloween get-up), and Mnemosyne, waiting for USDA-approved raisins. Central to When My Brother Was an Aztec is the speaker's brother, a meth head who dresses like Jesus (or is it Judas?) and a former serviceman, a source of terrific irony. Throughout, Diaz exhibits wit that is as much silly wordplay, puns, and one-liners (take, for example, the Last Mojave Barbie, whose trysts with Caucasian Ken mean trouble) as it is well-crafted humor, which is dark and dry, like the tense atmospheric static before a summer storm as thunderheads loom on the horizon.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)