Golden Ax by Rio Cortez: Your Complete Study Companion

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

This guide covers every chapter of Golden Ax, including detailed discussion of its concluding poems. The page is designed to help you understand the collection's full arc. If you prefer to encounter individual poems fresh, consider starting with the chapter-by-chapter table and reading one summary at a time.

Quick Facts

Short Summary

Golden Ax is a 2022 poetry collection by Rio Cortez that excavates personal memory, ancestral history, and Black life in the American West. Cortez introduces the concept of "Afropioneerism," reclaiming overlooked narratives of Black pioneers who settled in Utah after emancipation. The poems move between landscapes—the Great Salt Lake, Utah canyons, Harlem streets, and Louisiana's Whitney Plantation—as the speaker investigates her family's complex trajectory from enslavement to frontier settlement. Ancestors include Paul C. Howell, who became Utah's first Black police detective, and Byrdie Lee Howell Langon, who chronicled Salt Lake City's early Black community. Through work that blends archival research with science-fiction imagery, Cortez explores identity, motherhood, ecological grief, and the persistent question of belonging. The title poem reframes the pioneer wagon as a spaceship of abduction, positioning Black arrival in the West as both alienating and transformative. Throughout, the speaker navigates tensions between assimilation and authenticity, the archive and the imagined, building a collection that honors silenced ancestors while claiming space for a Black future.

Full Summary

A New Vocabulary for Black Western History

Golden Ax opens not with a poem but with an epigraph from Nat Love and an author's note that establishes the collection's founding concept. Cortez introduces the terms Afropioneerism and Afrofrontierism to describe her family's experience as Black pioneers in the West. She traces her ancestry to people enslaved in Louisiana who, after Reconstruction, migrated to Utah—perhaps drawn by the Gold Rush. This migration included her second and third great-grandfathers, Paul C. Howell and his son Abner Howell. Abner became an early Black convert to the Mormon church, creating tensions around race and faith that persist in the family today, especially given the LDS church's pre-1978 ban on Black priesthood holders.

Cortez draws on family memories, a pamphlet by Kate B. Carter, and a self-published book by her great-great-aunt Byrdie Langon. By claiming the term "Afropioneer" for her ancestors, she asserts that imagination itself is a tool of survival and historical recovery. The author's note frames the entire collection as an act of naming—a corrective to histories cut short by the design of transatlantic slavery.

The Western Landscape Poems

The collection's first movement roots itself in the physical and imaginative terrain of Utah. In "Covered Wagon as Spaceship", a child narrator hides in bluestem grass, questioning whether Black people were delivered to the canyons by extraterrestrials. The poem concludes that the story "begins with abduction," reframing pioneer migration as forced and alienating rather than voluntary. This science-fiction lens carries into "UFO, for Instance", where a forest clearing becomes a site of perceptual dissolution and the unknown.

"The Idea of Ancestry" turns from alienation toward continuity. The speaker stands in Millcreek Canyon and sees water her grandmother fished and timber her great-great-grandfather felled. The aspen's sound remains unchanged across generations. Imagining the timber becoming a house built by her great-great-grandmother, the speaker finds joy in ancestral labor and lies "like a calf in wildflowers," suggesting timeless connection to place.

"I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space between Mountains" meditates on memory, diaspora, and identity. The speaker recalls driving toward Zion with her mother, a photograph of her father speaking in Eyeri, and braiding willow to swing across a canal. The poem questions whether memory is reliable while defining a field—and by extension, identity—as the space between fixed points.

Ancestors and Archives

Several poems directly address ancestors or engage in archival excavation. "Far Enough" honors Byrdie Lee Howell Langon, who self-published a history of Salt Lake City's Black community. The poem presents Byrdie as someone who helps others discover their best qualities, with the title coming from a line in a poem presented by her pastor, Jerry Ford.

"Questions of the Last Relative Slave" addresses Paul C. Howell with two unanswered questions—whether he rejoiced after storms and whether he loved the wind. The poem offers no reply, leaving the questions suspended. Its imagery ties nature's violence to the experience of slavery, acknowledging the unknowable inner life of an enslaved person while refusing to fill historical silence with invention.

"Visiting Whitney Plantation" shifts to Louisiana, where the speaker searches for ancestors' names on a marble wall of seventy thousand first names. She sidesteps a white photographer to take her mother's hand, gathers Spanish moss, and later lies poolside at a French Quarter hotel, reflecting on the sun's cruelty to the enslaved. The poem ends with the words "desperate, almost," leaving the emotional weight of the visit unresolved.

"Family Tree at Earth's Surface" confronts the limits of genealogical research. The speaker uses archives, oral tradition, and intuition to trace her lineage to a nameless mother and her son. She identifies the beginning of Blackness with a boy named Jackson, a farmer and coffin builder. Ultimately, she finds comfort in a different kind of knowing—an arc in which the moon is mothered—and loses the impulse to keep counting names.

The Body, Transformation, and Salt

The poem "Salt" stands as one of the collection's centerpieces. The speaker sheds her body and walks onto the salt flats of the Great Salt Lake. Reaching into the red lake as if into a wound, she pulls out bones and becomes "two times the dark." She crushes brine shrimp skeletons and eats dormant eggs. Epigraphs from Brigham Young and Sun Ra frame the poem between settlement and cosmic liberation. The lake becomes a site of bodily permeability, witness, and reclamation.

Transformation recurs in "The End of Eating Everything", where a giantess speaker consumes whole bird tribes, her belly lined with woolly afghans from her grandmother's house. She has eaten even the front porch. The poem, written after visual artist Wangechi Mutu, explores the monstrous feminine and consumption as a kind of power.

"Self-Portrait in a Tanning Bed" offers a quieter transformation. The speaker, the only Black customer at a tanning salon, contemplates her reflection through goggles, first seeing a "reverse coon" but then liking her darker appearance. The poem situates identity and mortality within the ironic container of a Future Tan salon.

Contemporary Black Life and Dual Identity

The collection's middle section shifts to urban settings and contemporary experience. In "I'm Forced to Imagine There Are Two of Me Here", the speaker splits into two selves to navigate assimilation. The poem portrays violent self-discipline—not dancing, pulling hair, burning water—alongside the command to invoke a white grandmother to pass. Later, driving Little Cottonwood Canyon at night, the speaker hits a deer. She opens the doors, shares a bite of the cracked rib, and kisses the animal in a gesture of shared mercy.

"Black Annie Hall" presents a Black woman navigating urban leisure and subtle racial friction. She waits in line to see the 1920 film Within Our Gates, fails to hail a cab after an analyst appointment, and kills a black widow spider in her bathroom. The allusion to Woody Allen's film highlights how race complicates the most ordinary moments.

"Black Frasier Crane" introduces a prosperous but lonely Black woman living in a multi-generational household. She complains about espresso ratios and treats her staff like family, yet remains dissatisfied. The poem questions the challenge of being happy when one has everything and suggests that material abundance feeds an inner beast that consumes without satisfaction.

"Double Threat" examines jealousy and racial scrutiny within an intimate relationship. After a dinner party, the narrator spits near her partner's feet—a first-time act of violence. A white woman with groceries asks twice if she is okay, studying their Black faces. The poem closes with the narrator's mother in Millcreek avoiding a full-length mirror.

"Driving at Night" links misperception to racial violence. The speaker mistakes birchwood for quails and a woman with a dog for fawns, then reflects on how these errors parallel the way others see her community from a distance—hopeful at first, then disappointed. The dedication to Laquan McDonald, a Black teen killed by police, grounds the poem in specific grief.

Motherhood, Fear, and Inheritance

Motherhood emerges as a major thematic current through several poems. "North Node" describes a pre-birth vision in which the speaker appeared to her mother and spoke her name. The mother gave birth underwater out of love. The speaker carries a scorpion at her throat that must be cut away—a karmic struggle against desire that persists even in a loving home.

"Partum" addresses a "Little God, Oldest Friend," using childbirth imagery to explore transformation and divine immanence. The speaker consumes thistle and yolk, determined to live, and recalls being served sarsaparilla in Loa or Escalante.

"Écriture Féminine" confronts the narcissism embedded in maternal love. The speaker admits selfishness as the cause of her child's birth and realizes that her love is largely directed at the version of herself she sees in her child. The poem braids the child's hair while imitating maternal care, acknowledging the gap between performance and feeling.

"Fear of Motherhood" watches sea turtles laying eggs under moonlight and feels nothing until a stranger's gasp reveals the expected awe. The speaker fears that when her child is born, she will look at them with the same detached anxiety she felt standing at Sacré-Coeur in Paris, worrying about her walk home instead of enjoying the view.

"Maternal Instinct" captures a suspended moment: a child's cries intensify, but the speaker cannot decide whether to run toward the child or remain motionless. The poem depicts maternal instinct as something felt and resisted simultaneously, set against the intimate geography of Harlem.

Endings, Departures, and Community

The collection's final poems gesture toward closure without resolution. "Eden" places the speaker at a kitchen window washing her daughter's dishes while watching an elk on a mountain. She questions whether she is home or just visiting, then decides to answer for herself. The poem ends with the acknowledgment "I'm really leaving now," moving through the told story of her life. Domestic and natural imagery merge as the speaker contemplates home, belonging, and transformation.

"What Begets What Begets" meditates on cycles—emotional, relational, generational. The speaker uses the saying "hurt people hurt people" to comfort friends, distinguishes between intuitive knowing and submerged knowing, and ends by performing "the work of knowing" and offering thanks. The poem arrives at self-compassion within inescapable cycles.

The final chapter, "Penguin Poets", is a bibliography listing over one hundred poets in the Penguin Poets series, including Cortez herself. There is no narrative or dialogue. The chapter functions as an acknowledgment of literary community and tradition, closing the work with a statement about lineage that mirrors the ancestral excavation that opened it.

The Collection's Arc

Golden Ax moves from the question "How does a story begin?" to a place where the speaker can both answer for herself and acknowledge the limits of any answer. The collection builds a vocabulary—Afropioneerism, Afrofrontierism—for experiences that existing language cannot hold. It uses science fiction to estrange familiar pioneer narratives, salt as a medium of transformation, and the body as a site where history, desire, and violence become legible. By ending not with a definitive statement but with a list of other poets, Cortez positions her work as one entry in an ongoing conversation, one voice in a chorus that includes the unnamed and the archived alike.

Main Characters

• Rio Cortez (poet's persona) — The central speaker who navigates personal and ancestral memory, Afropioneer identity, and contemporary Black life across Western and urban landscapes.
• Byrdie Lee Howell Langon — The poet's great-great-aunt who self-published a history of Salt Lake City's Black community, honored in "Far Enough."
• Paul C. Howell — An enslaved ancestor who became Utah's first Black police detective, addressed in "Questions of the Last Relative Slave."
• Marion — A friend or family member who gives the speaker a 1982 Chevrolet Citation, symbolizing the threshold to adulthood.
• Black Annie Hall — A character navigating urban leisure, autonomy, and subtle racial friction through an allusion to Woody Allen's film.
• Black Frasier Crane — A prosperous but lonely Black woman in a multi-generational household, whose overthinking critiques privilege and consumption.

Central Themes

• Afropioneerism — The collection redefines Black Western history by claiming "Afropioneer" as a term for ancestors who migrated and built lives in the West, blending personal genealogy with forgotten narratives.
• Identity and Duality — The speaker repeatedly experiences split selves, assimilation, and tension between how she sees herself and how she is seen, especially in poems like "I'm Forced to Imagine There Are Two of Me Here."
• Memory and Ancestry — Cortez excavates family history through archives, oral tradition, and imagination, questioning memory's reliability while honoring the unnamed and silenced.
• Ecological Grief and Nature — Disrupted animal behavior and natural decay link personal loss to environmental crisis, using landscapes like Antelope Island and the Great Salt Lake as witnesses.
• Motherhood and Fear — The speaker explores maternal instinct, ambivalence, and generational anxiety, from pre-birth visions to the fear of detachment.

Key Symbols

• Salt — The Great Salt Lake and its salt flats symbolize bodily transformation, witness, and reclamation, as the speaker sheds her body and consumes brine shrimp in "Salt."
• Covered Wagon as Spaceship — The title poem reimagines pioneer migration as science-fiction abduction, blending history with Afrofuturism to reframe Black arrival in the West as forced and alienating.
• Scorpion — In "North Node," a scorpion clings to the speaker's throat, representing internal struggle against desire and a karmic lesson that must be cut away.
• Robin's Egg — In "Emancipation Queen," a robin's egg encloses a Black girl on stage, questioning whether beauty and emancipation can coexist, with the egg as a fragile container of identity.

How the Collection Ends

The final thematic poem, "Eden," places the speaker at a kitchen window washing her daughter's dishes while an elk moves on a mountain. She asks whether she is home or merely visiting, then answers for herself. The poem acknowledges departure—"I'm really leaving now"—while moving through the told story of a life. Rather than a tidy resolution, the collection closes with a bibliography of the Penguin Poets series, listing over one hundred names including Cortez's own. This choice positions Golden Ax within a living literary tradition, mirroring the ancestral lineage that opens the book. The arc moves from the question "How does a story begin?" to a quiet acceptance that stories continue, multiply, and belong to communities wider than any single voice. For a more detailed discussion, see the full ending explained.

Chapter-by-Chapter Guide

Common Questions

1. What kind of book is Golden Ax?

Golden Ax is a poetry collection by Rio Cortez that blends autobiography, imagined history, and archival research to explore Black life in the American West. Cortez coins the term "Afropioneerism" to describe her family's experience as Black pioneers in Utah after emancipation. The poems move between Utah landscapes, New York City streets, and Louisiana plantations, using lyric, narrative, and experimental forms.

2. What does the title Golden Ax refer to?

The title echoes The Broad Ax, an African American newspaper published in Salt Lake City around the time Cortez's ancestors arrived in Utah, as noted in the Author's Note. The "golden" modifier suggests both value and the Western setting, while the ax itself functions as a tool for cutting through buried history and breaking open untold narratives.

3. Who are the key historical ancestors in the collection?

Two ancestors recur throughout the work. Paul C. Howell, who was enslaved and later became Utah's first Black police detective, is addressed directly in "Questions of the Last Relative Slave". Byrdie Lee Howell Langon, the poet's great-great-aunt, self-published a history of Salt Lake City's Black community and is honored in "Far Enough". Abner Howell, Paul's son, was an early Black convert to Mormonism—a decision that created lasting tensions around race and faith.

4. How does the collection approach motherhood?

Motherhood appears across multiple poems and emotional registers. "North Node" describes a pre-birth vision and karmic inheritance. "Écriture Féminine" confronts the narcissism that can inhabit maternal love. "Fear of Motherhood" explores the anxiety that protective instincts might prevent deep connection. "Maternal Instinct" captures a moment where the impulse to run toward a crying child and the impulse to remain still are equally strong.

5. What role does the Great Salt Lake play?

In the poem "Salt", the lake becomes a site of bodily transformation and witness. The speaker sheds her physical form, reaches into the red water as if into a wound, and consumes brine shrimp eggs. The poem uses epigraphs from Brigham Young and Sun Ra to frame the lake between pioneer settlement and cosmic liberation. The salt flats function as a space where identity becomes permeable and the land itself testifies.

6. How does Cortez use science fiction imagery?

Several poems employ science fiction to estrange familiar histories. "Covered Wagon as Spaceship" reimagines the pioneer wagon as an alien abduction vessel, questioning whether Black arrival in the West was voluntary. "UFO, for Instance" uses a forest clearing as the site of a perceptual encounter with the unknown. These moves connect to Afrofuturism's broader project of using speculative frameworks to reexamine Black pasts and futures.

7. What happens in the Whitney Plantation poem?

"Visiting Whitney Plantation" depicts the speaker's contemporary visit to the Louisiana plantation museum. She searches for ancestors' names on a marble wall listing seventy thousand first names, sidesteps a white photographer to take her mother's hand, and later lies poolside at a French Quarter hotel reflecting on the sun's cruelty to the enslaved. The poem grapples with the legacy of slavery as a lived, ongoing reality rather than a closed chapter.

8. How does Golden Ax end?

The final thematic poem, "Eden", places the speaker at a kitchen window washing dishes while watching an elk. She asks whether she is home or merely visiting, then answers for herself, acknowledging she is "really leaving now." The collection's last chapter, "Penguin Poets", is a bibliography of over one hundred poets in the Penguin Poets series, including Cortez herself. This gesture situates the work within a literary community, mirroring the ancestral lineage that opens the book.

Explore Deeper

• Ending Explained
• Questions and Answers
• Quiz: Test Your Knowledge
• Essay Prompts

Characters:

• Rio Cortez (poet's persona)
• Byrdie Lee Howell Langon
• Paul C. Howell
• Marion
• Black Annie Hall
• Black Frasier Crane

Themes:

• Afropioneerism
• Identity and Duality
• Memory and Ancestry
• Ecological Grief and Nature
• Motherhood and Fear

Symbols:

• Salt
• Covered Wagon as Spaceship
• Scorpion
• Robin's Egg