Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Rio Cortez (The ABCs of Black History) opens Golden Ax with an author's note, defining it as a work of "Afropioneerism" or "Afrofrontierism." She explains that it is "autobiographical, but it is also a work of imagined history." This debut collection, more than 45 poems divided into three sections, considers the intersections of place and self, asking readers to wonder with Cortez about the ways in which history and fiction intertwine and how "we imagine ourselves into existence." Though drawn from personal family history, the poems in Golden Ax engage the universal, enlarging the sense of self they describe.
Even as each piece varies in style, structure and tone, the collection has a unifying sensibility. From prose poems drawing on historical events to a series of works replacing a white character (Annie Hall, Frasier Crane) with a Black woman, Cortez plays with form and brings a distinct and inventive perspective in every poem. The collection, despite incongruities, hangs together through its rich, evocative language and lived-in landscapes, as seen in "The Idea of Ancestry": "and before then/ the roof had been aspen/ its green coins/ singing in the wind/ and I know it sang/ because I have stood right/ at the center of its singing/ the same singing/ heard by black bears/ or the calf of a moose/ lying/ even sweeter/ in the yarrow/ showing/ we can be dark/ and shining/ in the wildflowers." The short lines and enjambment invite an urgency, a shortening of the distance between the past and any given present. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian