Devi S. Laskar on Natalie Diaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec

(Guest post by Devi S. Laskar)

One of my favorite Natalie Diaz poems is her pantoum “My Brother at 3 a.m.,” in her first book, When My Brother Was An Aztec.  

I am first a poet and I had the pleasure of being Natalie’s student for one day several years ago, in a workshop in Santa Cruz. She is a terrific teacher and she talked about perspective and writing practice and continuity. Pantoum is a favorite poetry form of mine, I love the way the lines are braided through the stanzas and how you as a writer have a chance to perform a bit of magic and change meaning or perspective. In Natalie’s poetry, I admire how she tackles difficult subjects. In the case of this pantoum, it’s drug addiction. The language is vivid and precise and she gets the pantoum to bend a little at the end so that we readers end up with two POVs and it’s pure poetic magic.

I’ve just begun reading her new book Postcolonial Love Poem and it’s wonderful. 

The poem I’d like to share is one that came out in Press53 a couple of years ago: “On Sadness.” You can find it on my website: devislaskar.com or here at Press53.

What I like about this poem is that it is a mirror poem, it reverses itself — I modeled it after Natasha Trethewey’s wonderful poem, “Myth.” I was interested in how she was able to transform the poem and the meaning from one stanza to the next and I wanted to try it for myself. It took several tries — “On Sadness” discusses misinterpretations.

Devi S. Laskar is a native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. The Atlas of Reds and Blues—winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the Crook’s Corner Book Prize—is her first novel. It was selected by The Georgia Center for the Book as a book “All Georgians Should Read,” long-listed for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature, and long-listed for the Golden Poppy Award presented by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. The Atlas of Reds and Blues was named by The Washington Post as one of the best books of 2019, and has garnered praise in Time, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and elsewhere. A former newspaper reporter, Laskar is now a poet, photographer, essayist, and novelist.