“My Brother Was An Aztec,” that devastating volume, came to me when I was putting together a syllabus at the University of Regina, whose English degree requirements specify the inclusion of Indigenous literature. I’d not read her work before. In the collection, Diaz reflects on her brother’s addiction in ways that defy the innocuousness of that term, reflection. These are poems that break lines, images, sensation, sense-making—breaking open what is broken without expectation of a return to anything like equanimity or healing.
“Postcolonial Love Poem,” Diaz’s intensely lauded second collection, came to me more organically, in excerpts and quotations and, recently, a sensitive and insightful conference presentation
@aclaorg by Georgi de Rham, which explored “Exhibits from the American Water Museum.” Hearing Georgi’s talk, I was reminded of Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place,” and the provocation of the second-person address. In Diaz’s poem, it is not the narrator but the “lyric I” who turns outward, addresses “you.” *
With less than a week to go before the deadline for
@montrealprize submissions, I’d like to reintroduce our inestimable final judge:
Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe (Akimel O’odham). “Postcolonial Love Poem” (
@graywolfpress , 2020) won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and her first book, “When My Brother Was an Aztec” (
@copper_canyon_press , 2012), won an American Book Award. Among her many accolades, Diaz is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow. She is Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry
@arizonastateuniversity . She is currently a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy.
*
First image: detail from Michael Norton’s “Gen Rose Madder (Not Light Fast)” (2011), from the collection of Eileen Harris Norton, co-founder of Norton Computing.
P.S. If you’ve read this far, let me tell you something: when you google “Eileen Harris Norton Wikipedia,” it takes you to her husband’s page.
