When My Brother Was an Aztec
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Natalie Diaz. (2012). When My Brother Was an Aztec. Copper Canyon Press.

Natalie Diaz. 2012. When My Brother Was an Aztec. Copper Canyon Press.

Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec. Copper Canyon Press, 2012.

Natalie Diaz. When My Brother Was an Aztec. Copper Canyon Press, 2012.

OverDrive Product Record

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When My Brother Was an Aztec

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When My Brother Was an Aztec

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   • fileAs: Diaz, Natalie
   • bioText:

     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.

   • name: Natalie Diaz

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Poetry

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2012-12-04T00:00:00Z

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12/04/2012

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shortDescription

A fast-paced debut that draws upon reservation folklore, pop culture, fractured gospels, and her brother's addiction to methamphetamine|

"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!

With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt...

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title

When My Brother Was an Aztec

fullDescription

A fast-paced debut that draws upon reservation folklore, pop culture, fractured gospels, and her brother's addiction to methamphetamine|

"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!

With 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.

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reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.)

popularity

75

publisher

Copper Canyon Press

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bisacCodes

1. • code: POE005010
   • description: POETRY / American / General