kjboldon's review against another edition
5.0
Stunning. Visceral. Painful. Sexy. So many things. Powerful.
thegayngelgabriel's review against another edition
5.0
A rich and delicious collection, unafraid to get uncomfortable or strange or painful, but attuned to the beauty and humor in such discomfort, absurdity, pain.
silodear's review against another edition
4.0
My favorite was “No More Cake Here”
To be perfectly honest, I think poetry mostly just isn’t for me. A poem here and there? Great! A book of it? Not so much.
SPL 2019 book bingo: poetry or play
To be perfectly honest, I think poetry mostly just isn’t for me. A poem here and there? Great! A book of it? Not so much.
SPL 2019 book bingo: poetry or play
sam_bizar_wilcox's review against another edition
4.0
Natalie Diaz has an incredibly daring and savvy poetic voice. Her work centers on indigeneity, capitalism, and class; each weighty subject she treats with smooth comprehension. I love seeing her evolve throughout the course of this collection. I haven't read her follow-up Postcolonial Love Poem, but given the strength of debut, I imagine it is spectacular.
jheinemann287's review against another edition
4.0
Since quarantine began, I've made a habit of reading a poem a day in the morning. When My Brother Was an Aztec was both perfect for that and not at all. These poems are DENSE. Between the frequent allusions to history, the Bible, and other writers' style and Diaz's penchant for experimenting with specific poem structures, this collection sometimes feels designed to be a studied. I noted the ones that I'd like to bring to my American Literature classroom during the fall semester when we read There There by Tommy Orange, but it's also difficult to imagine any of them being taught as a supplement. These poems demand their own study and research. They allude to an important history that requires context, and they allude to each other in a way that would be a shame to brush past.
It's insane to critique such powerful and well-crafted writing, but if I had one it would be that this collection had me in my thinking more than my feeling.
But then there are the lines that kick you in the gut.
Her diabetic grandmother asks the speaker to rub her amputated legs: “Her missing kneecaps are bright bones caught in my throat” (16).
A semi drives over a migration of tarantulas: “I can still hear the crunch. I can feel the ones that kept crawling, / over the others, their brothers and sisters. / Busted scabs in the road” (57).
A woman eats an apple that “pulses like a red bird in her hand”: “She bites, cleaving away a red wing. / The red bird sings. Yes, / she bites the apple and there is music-- / a branch breaking, a ship undone by the shore, / a knife making love to a wound, the sweet scrape / of a match lighting the lamp of her mouth” (74).
When she imagines her lover being with someone else: “Tonight I am riddled by this thick skull / this white bowling ball zipped in the sad-sack carrying case of my face” (79)
Her meth-addicted brother makes a mess of her parents' home: “--my mom tries to dress the place up: riddled doilies, / the burning-heart Jesus with eyes that used to follow us / around the room until someone plucked out each bright circle. / Now my fingers slip down into the slick holes in Jesus’s face” (55).
The most powerful are the ones about how her brother's meth addiction impacts her family. In "How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs" (46), her brother comes downstairs dressed in a three-piece skeleton suit as if for a Day of the Dead parade and, when she makes him go change, comes down again as a Judas effigy. Anyone who knows the pain of loving someone who won't love themselves can feel the speaker's exasperation: "because tonight you are not in the mood / to have your heart ripped out. It gets old, / having your heart ripped out, / being opened that way." She remembers taking him in once, not so much as "a three-quarter-court / heave, a buzzer-beater to win something of him back" than as a way to "ease / the guilt of never having tried." When she finally asked him to leave, he "left [her] / with his meth pipe ringing in the dryer." So at dinner, when the speaker pours her "thirty pieces of silver / onto the table and ask[s], 'What can I get for this?'", you can't blame her.
It's insane to critique such powerful and well-crafted writing, but if I had one it would be that this collection had me in my thinking more than my feeling.
But then there are the lines that kick you in the gut.
Her diabetic grandmother asks the speaker to rub her amputated legs: “Her missing kneecaps are bright bones caught in my throat” (16).
A semi drives over a migration of tarantulas: “I can still hear the crunch. I can feel the ones that kept crawling, / over the others, their brothers and sisters. / Busted scabs in the road” (57).
A woman eats an apple that “pulses like a red bird in her hand”: “She bites, cleaving away a red wing. / The red bird sings. Yes, / she bites the apple and there is music-- / a branch breaking, a ship undone by the shore, / a knife making love to a wound, the sweet scrape / of a match lighting the lamp of her mouth” (74).
When she imagines her lover being with someone else: “Tonight I am riddled by this thick skull / this white bowling ball zipped in the sad-sack carrying case of my face” (79)
Her meth-addicted brother makes a mess of her parents' home: “--my mom tries to dress the place up: riddled doilies, / the burning-heart Jesus with eyes that used to follow us / around the room until someone plucked out each bright circle. / Now my fingers slip down into the slick holes in Jesus’s face” (55).
The most powerful are the ones about how her brother's meth addiction impacts her family. In "How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs" (46), her brother comes downstairs dressed in a three-piece skeleton suit as if for a Day of the Dead parade and, when she makes him go change, comes down again as a Judas effigy. Anyone who knows the pain of loving someone who won't love themselves can feel the speaker's exasperation: "because tonight you are not in the mood / to have your heart ripped out. It gets old, / having your heart ripped out, / being opened that way." She remembers taking him in once, not so much as "a three-quarter-court / heave, a buzzer-beater to win something of him back" than as a way to "ease / the guilt of never having tried." When she finally asked him to leave, he "left [her] / with his meth pipe ringing in the dryer." So at dinner, when the speaker pours her "thirty pieces of silver / onto the table and ask[s], 'What can I get for this?'", you can't blame her.
therealworldaccordingtosam's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
slow-paced
2.0
aroyster's review against another edition
5.0
Thoughtful insight into BIPOC feminism, refreshing postcolonial retelling of biblical stories, effective use of various forms, seamless world-building, and a heck of a great read.
casparb's review against another edition
I’m really fascinated by this as a contrast to Postcolonial Love Poem and while PLP is obviously a suitable title for that collection it seems even more so a love poem - a devotion from the depths - in contrast with My Brother, a heart-wrung semi-elegy & approach to her life as it attempts to digest her brother’s meth addiction.
Díaz is on absolutely top form but in such a different way to PLP which is both quiet and tectonic. Also WMBWAA seems to me exponentially more concerned with catholicism that PLP ever was. Their differences may seem to invite a one-or-other approach I don’t feel there’s a clear answer I need them both reread. what a fascinating piece of the Díaz oeuvre I’m glad we’re here
Díaz is on absolutely top form but in such a different way to PLP which is both quiet and tectonic. Also WMBWAA seems to me exponentially more concerned with catholicism that PLP ever was. Their differences may seem to invite a one-or-other approach I don’t feel there’s a clear answer I need them both reread. what a fascinating piece of the Díaz oeuvre I’m glad we’re here