Golden Ax

"In Golden Ax, Rio Cortez writes, “I’m a light. Fed by an other light.” Her ancestors – Black pioneers who moved West after Reconstruction – “embodied the Afrofrontier,” and Cortez holds space for them in her poems: “the land where Utah exists haunts our story, but we are even more vast.” With a careful balance of lyric and detail, Cortez considers the pursuit of freedom passed down to her. She writes, “I do the work of knowing” – because it is work looking back at a violent past. But she also shows us how looking back can be beautiful and how claiming that past is the loudest celebration of it."