I hate raisins because now I know,
my mom was hungry that day, too,
and I ate all the raisins.
The bulk of this collection of poems are directed toward making the experience of Native American on American reservations come to life. The result is a full-fledged portrait that covers humor and desperation, boredom and humiliation and all the multitudes of everyday life. These are the concluding lines of a poem constructed around a litany of reasons that reservation life might lead the speaker to hate raisins before pulling out the blade and sticking it into the reader’s guts with a heartbreaking moment of self-revelation explaining a situation that most American readers would never otherwise think twice about.
Now we have two fathers,
one who weeps any time he hears the word Presto!
The other who drags his feet down the hall at night
Neither has the stomach for steak anymore.
The second section of the collection moves from the more expansive territory of reservation life to focus on the title character, that brother who was an Aztec. He was also a magician at one time, capable of thrilling the family with the sudden appearance from animals and scarves and the ritualistic finale of carving their father in half with a steak knife. But this is a poem written from memory, from a point in the unseen future of those fun days before her brother became a victim of the dark magic of drug addiction and ripped the family into more than cleanly sliced halves.
He slept
in filthy clothes smelling of rotten peaches and matches, fell in love
with sparkling spoonfuls the carnival dog-women fed him. My parents
lost their appetites for food, for sons. Like all bad kings, my brother
wore a crown, a green baseball cap turned backwards
with a Mexican flag embroidered on it.
The volume actually opens with the title poem placed before Part I and it acts almost like a teaser for a TV show in which the backstory and the narrative progression will be returned to later. It tells the story of the brother’s descent into addiction, but through densely figurative language. The poem is a flood of imagery, metaphor, allusion and other literary techniques engaged to convey an entire story, but in such an oblique way that hardly anyone could pick up on all the clues to penetrate with any real certainty to the irrefutable facts of the case.
When my brother died
I worried there wasn't enough time
to deliver the one hundred invitations
I'd scribbled while on the phone with the mortuary
Well, by the time one reaches this poem which closes the second section devoted to her brother and the impact upon his family, it is has already become painfully clear this story was not heading toward a happy ending. The book features a third section and it is somewhat lacking in the cohesion of thematic unity which shapes parts one and two. But that is almost to be expected as well because the emotional tension of the poems in section two would be almost impossible to simply close shut and move on. The resonance of the pain and guilty and misery and scars which attach to the speaker by the time she is forced to deny access to cake to a couple of tweakers who did the whole drug scene with her brother lingers on and informs the poems which comprise section three which commanding them.
