Golden Ax (Penguin Poets) by Rio Cortez

Golden Ax (Penguin Poets) Reviews

• 
  Roxane

  Outstanding collection of poetry. I particularly liked the author’s note at the beginning, where she discusses afrofrontierism and afropioneerism. As a black person from
  Nebraska I appreciated poetry from a black woman born and raised in Utah. My favorite poem was Black Lead in a Nancy Meyers Film which is charming and then subtly unfolds into a quietly devastating last line. As a whole, the poetry in these pages is intelligent, lyrical, as invested in the past as the present and future with witty nods to pop culture.
• 
  Chanecka

  I am rather stunned with what Rio Cortez has done in this collection. I can count on my hands the number of times poetry has made me feel like I have stepped inside of a time warp. I found myself stumbling back into this time and space each time I put this collection down. This is an essential piece of work for the Black literary canon.
  
  Most of the poems in this collection are about Cortez’s ancestry. She calls them Afro-pioneers as they are some of the first Black people in the West. A lot of the poems are rooted in artifacts, the things that have been left over from her ancestor’s lives. However, there is an imagined history here as well, a little magic added to these poems and I think that’s what makes this collection special. This magical realism creates vivid imagery of the land, the animals and people.
  
  However, this collection does not neglect this time that we are living in. Cortez touches on some very timeless topics–motherhood/womanhood, love, ritual, mundanity. These poems felt so tender. I felt the need to sit with them or they would break or fall apart. These poems, these meditations force you to slow down.
  
  I am so thankful to Penguin for the ARC.
• 
  Lauren

  HOW DID WE GET HERE? // A fascinating poetry collection that coins the term "Afrofrontierism"
  
  • GOLDEN AX by Rio Cortez
  
  *Covered Wagon as Spaceship*
  
  "Standing unseen in the little bluestem,
  curious and not quite used to living,
  I consider whether it’s aliens
  that brought Black folks to the canyons, valley.
  
  Standing in the great evaporation
  of a lake, holy dandelion for
  eyes, full and white and searching the landscape
  for understanding: how do you come
  to be where there are no others, except
  science fiction?
  I am a child feeling
  extraterrestrial; whose history, untold,
  is not enough.
  Anyway, it begins with abduction."
  
  
  A collection that quotes Sun Ra right next to Brigham Young, landscapes of Utah from red rocks to snowy peaks, memories of a Black girl on Pioneer Day celebrations in Salt Lake City, Indigenous inhabitants of the land where she was born, and imagining Black characters in some of her favorite 80s and 90s films and tv shows - just some tastes of this brilliant collection ☀️
  
  Cortez calls this a work a Afrofrontierism and Afropioneerism, a riff on Afrofuturism, recalling her childhood in Utah and it's history of "pioneers", her family's history with the Latter Day Saints, and her family's own genealogy of Black people in this western US state.
  
  This is a nominee for the National Book Award for Poetry 2022 - and the only one I've read of the list - but I'd be quite happy to see it take the top honor. ✨
• 
  Carolyn

  The “best poetry I read this year” competition is already a fierce battle and then BAM in comes this piece of gloriousness. Even the author’s note is so beautiful I’ve continued to reread it along with the poems. As a whitey-white, I have to take others’ words as to how deeply they speak to the Black condition (look up Roxane Gay’s review), but I can certainly testify to how deeply they speak to the human condition—these poems are a well you will never touch the bottom of.
  
  “…………………….What is it that they say God
  is subject to? Continuous Revelation. It feels
  like a loophole, but, it takes a lot to admit
  when you’re wrong.”
  
  There are definitely some poems here that are total brain twisters and there are others that so easily unravel things you’ve never really been able to put words to yourself.
  
  I did write a list of faves but these aren’t even where most of my underlines are so… just read the book.
  
  My faves are:
  North Node
  The Idea of Ancestry
  Emancipation Queen (this one twists my brain so hard)
  Black Lead in a Nancy Meyers Film (/swoon/)
  Ars Poetica with Mother and Dogs
• 
  elena

  Thank you to NetGalley for sending me this ARC!!
  
  Honestly this was an incredible poetry collection. There were various formats as how the poetry was told. The language is lyrical and I found myself often times rereading the same poem over and over again. This felt like an intimate collection of poetry that questions life on various levels of experience and identity we as readers may or may not understand and that is 100% okay because AGAIN this was an excellent collection.
  
  One of my favorite poems was titled “I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space between Mountains” which starts like this - “If I remember a field where I stroked the velvety hound’s-tongue and cracked its purple mouth from stem and it is not a memory, then what we’re the limits of the field?” oof that’s good.
• 
  Crystal

  Beauty always strikes me when I consider it leaving and am hurt by it
  how now light enters through the curtains at dusk and I find it beautiful
  because it is about to change
  
  (from “What Begets What Begets”)
  
  I consider choosing
  there are times
  when it is a joy
  to remember
  I like to think about my people
  drinking fresh buttermilk
  from the chosen farms
  of their other people
  all of us gazing
  back at the house
  framed by our future knowing
  filling up on fresh tomatoes
  and after
  maybe lying like the silk calf
  in the deerwood and the aster
  and never-ending
  
  (from “The Idea of Ancestry”)
  
  I’m here to learn a lesson. I spent my other lives in the Nevada desert, where I only did what felt good. What could that mean? I reconcile the pleasure in lying naked on the hot sand of the Mojave, watching the braided muscles in a horse’s hind legs with the ocean nowhere, a frying chest on the hood of an idle car. So comes a lesson, I’m here to cut the scorpion from my throat. Even though it has dragged me through sweet darkness and time. Even now, in the stillness of home, in love and full of wine, it wraps its eight legs around me. Even through the lilies, it sets its many eyes on me and, suddenly, longing
  
  (from “North Node”)
• 
  Laurel

  Every time I come across a book that reminds me why I love language I have to give it five stars.
  
  I've already read some of these poems a dozen times, and I cannot understate the empathy and complexity that Cortez has managed to get on the page here. Communicating immediacy while illustrating the past takes talent. If you've ever been one for poetry - modern, historical, or otherwise I want to see what you make of this collection.
• 
  Vivek

  There were a few poems in here I really liked, but I had a hard time connecting to most. I love the cover and the intro note at the beginning, and generally was really into the concept of what Rio Cortez was exploring here. Just didn’t hit like I was hoping. I may try to revisit this one another time.
• 
  Stephanie

  I will now immediately reread this collection.
• 
  Gail

  I really liked some. Other poems were just not for me.
• 
  Kayla - the.bookish.mama

  What really stuck out to me was the way that the collection was divided into sections of past, present, and future, and how each was almost a nod to the next even though the styles and topics in each were vastly different. This one really kept me engaged, wanting to see where the next poem would lead, and I ended up finishing it quickly. I’m not sure that I have ever read another collection like this one, and I’m not complaining.
• 
  Kokie

  Beautiful writing that goes deep and made me pause to think and reread to let it sink in. Wonderful collection!
• 
  Arie Julia

  5 stars all around! I don’t normally read poetry books but I read an interview with Rio Cortez. (I’ve been following her since The ABC’s of Black History) and I decided to pick it up, and wow! She has made me a poetry book reader! It’s beautiful. I will also be picking up her other poetry collection “ I have learned to define a field as a space between mountains”.
  
  Fantastic.
  
  
• 
  Oscreads

  Loveeeeeddd this!!
• 
  it’s ríce!!!✩

  somewhere between tenderness and rapture
• 
  Natalie Park

  4.5 stars
• 
  Karena Bakas

  SO good. Afrofuturism’s energy with the imagery and landscape of Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” The poet describes this persona piece as Afropioneerism or Afrofrontierism.
• 
  Mel Frieders

  gorgeous and heartbreaking and a great introduction to afropioneerism for me. absolute favorite poem was “Black Lead in a Nancy Meyers Film”
• 
  Dree

  The author's note at the beginning of this book made me very hopeful for this collection-- she explain's her freed family's traveling from Louisiana and ending up in Utah, with her 3ggrandfather being the first black police detective in Utah, where she grew up. What an amazing and interesting history.
  
  And the collection starts out that way. It then moves into New York and pop culture references that I only half understood before reading the notes at the end. I wish poetry publishers would put the relevant note at the bottom of the poem itself--it is so disconcerting to go flipping through and looking for something (that might not actually be there) so necessary to understand a poem.
• 
  Stephanie

  4.5. You have to sip not devour.
• 
  Patricia N. McLaughlin

  A work of “Afropioneerism” or “Afrofrontierism” (terms coined by the poet), this collection is both autobiographical and a work of imagined history, exploring “the outward and earthly landscapes of the Afrofrontier”; mining the hidden history of the Black West and how her family ended up “smack-dab in the Wasatch Mountains” of Utah; and exploring the “inner, cosmic imagination of the Afropioneer” as she conjures herself and her ancestors into existence.
  
  “One layer of that knowing is of the self.
  Isn’t it like that for everyone? Sometimes
  the ring comes round and I feel I don’t deserve a thing.
  Then I do the work of knowing. I see myself
  reflected in the bathroom mirror, it’s been a long
  day and I’m alone, my hair pulled into a tight chignon,
  and I know better by looking at me next to nothing, compared
  to nothing, and I say thanks to someone out there”
  —from “What Begets What Begets”
  
  Favorite Poems:
  “Like a Suggestion”
  “I’m Forced to Imagine There Are Two of Me Here”
  “Partum”
  “Marion’s 1982 Chevrolet Citation”
  “A Class Distinction”
  “As Cain”
  “To Salt Lake, Letter Regarding Genealogy”
  “Conduction”
  “Black Lead in a Nancy Meyers Film”
  “What Begets What Begets”
  “Ecriture Feminine”
  “Black Frazier Crane”
  “Pre-Earth and Post-Earth Life”
• 
  Shannon

  Cortez's poems do many intriguing things. They uncover a lost history, a black mythology of sorts, as the speaker searches for both personal and collective legacies. They also shed light on the common viewpoint of black success, recasting Annie Hall and Frasier Crane as black but within their signature white-privileged roles. I'm not sure the lack of emotive or evocative language here works for some of the poems, though they lack not of lyricism or creative imagery; while I deeply appreciate that Cortez does not wax sentimentalism, there is some degree of distancing in the way she postures her speaker in polished images and meticulous phrases. An element of something genuine feels a bit missing.
• 
  Asa

  Thanks to the publisher for this ARC - I thoroughly enjoyed the concept and content of these poems grappling with what Cortez refers to as "Afrofronterism" or "Afropioneerism" - a way of looking at her past and ancestry by imaginative and almost sci-fi esque means akin to how Afrofuturism approaches the future. I must say this is a great concept. However, I felt unsure of whether it needed to be represented in poetry as opposed to another form of literature or media. For instance, I would love to see this translated into a graphic novel, or perhaps a mini series. I'm curious to see what other readers think!
• 
  Caroline

  3 stars
  
  I was really intrigued by the "Afropioneerism/Afrofrontierism" concept laid out in the opening author's note, and the collection started strongly (the second poem, "Covered Wagon as Spaceship," was a standout), but I don't think Cortez leans into the concept nearly enough. I also wasn't vibing with her choice of pop culture references (Woody Allen films, really? In 2023?); therefore, the more modern-focused poems largely fell flat for me.
  
  Side note: I don't have very good luck with Penguin Books poets.
• 
  Isaac Salazar

  this collection speaks to Black migration, movement, and land in the West. the author’s note did wonders in contextualizing my reader position within “afropioneerism,” or the Black frontier, which i also ascribe to Jordan Peele’s recent film Nope. however, there are some fragmented thoughts in most of these pieces that i couldn’t connect
• 
  Sarah

  There are some gems in this collection, one of my favourites being Black Frasier Crane because absolutely I want to think about who that character might be, and what their existence might say, about the world we might be able to conjure if we just give ourselves a moment to contemplate the possibilities.
• 
  Antonio Delgado

  Afrofuturism does not belong solely to science fiction, but to fiction and its historical aspiration or representation. Rio Cortez’ poems bring forward the past, as she admits imaginary and real, the present, which still lingers in the contemporary imaginary, and future, of which poetry has the agency to create as it has already been created by history and fiction.
• 
  Ryan Mishap

  Excavating her family's history as Black pioneers while examining the present and imagining the future, Cortez also tries to create a new genre of Afropioneer.
  
  A lot of these went over my head, but I am still thinking about her description of Aspens.