Review by New York Times Review
Along with his stint as an Aztec, Diaz's brother has been a magus, a moth and a garden. He shows up for dinner dressed as a skeleton, then changes into a Judas costume complete with a lamp-cord noose. To put it yet another way, he is addicted to meth - "his singing sirens, his jealous jinn / conjuring up sandstorms within him" - and metaphor is Diaz's way of dealing with him. It allows her to dramatize both his shape-shifting and her efforts to pin him down, and its insufficiency is a big part of the pathos in this first collection. Each transformation is a fresh reminder that he can't be fixed in either sense: made better or fully apprehended. "Your brother's jaw is a third passenger in the truck - / it flexes in the wind coming in through the window, / resetting and rehinging, opening and closing / against its will. It will occur to you / your brother is a beat-down, dubbed Bruce Lee -/ his words do not match his mouth, which is moving / faster and faster." Diaz grew up on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, where she now works with the last four fluent speakers of Mojave to save their fading language. On the evidence collected in this ambitious, uneven, beautiful book, her skill with metaphor owes much to her being a good listener. An old woman "curses in Mojave some mornings Prays in English most nights Told me to keep my eyes open for the white man named Diabetes who is out there somewhere carrying her legs in red biohazard bags tucked under his arms."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 27, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
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.--Baez, Diego Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
