When My Brother Was an Aztec

Author: Natalie Diaz

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (2012)

Natalie Diaz’s debut collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of the mythological intensity of tribal life and a deeply rooted cultural history. In these distinctively voiced poems, a sister struggles with a brother’s addiction to meth, while everyone, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus, is invited to hash it out. By turns darkly humorous and sensual, Diaz’s poems gather imagery and language as readily as they illuminate the intimate and engage the communal. Whether Diaz tells of a son stealing the family’s lightbulbs, a father pushing his Sisyphean heart to jail to post bail yet again, or a woman inhabiting the embrace of her lover, When My Brother Was an Aztec marks an exciting poetic debut.