12 Analytical Essay Prompts for Rio Cortez's Golden Ax

These prompts are designed for close reading of Golden Ax. Each targets specific poems, characters, or structural moves rather than the collection as a whole. Use the evidence leads to build a text-based argument.

For background on the book’s central terms, begin with the Author’s Note, then explore related themes and characters.

Prompt 1: The Covered Wagon as a Sci‑Fi Vessel

Why this matters
The poem “Covered Wagon as Spaceship” (Chapter 4) forces a collision between two genres—Western pioneer narrative and Afrofuturist allegory. Analyzing this metaphor reveals how Cortez rewrites migration as abduction, not adventure.

Sample thesis direction
By reframing the covered wagon as a spaceship and the journey west as an abduction, Cortez replaces a voluntary pioneer myth with a forced diaspora narrative, using science‑fiction imagery to reclaim historical trauma.

Evidence leads

The speaker hides in bluestem grass and feels alien, with eyes like a dandelion (Chapter 4).
The poem concludes that the story “begins with abduction.”
The Author’s Note (Chapter 2) defines Afropioneerism and connects it to Afrofuturism.
Contrast this with the later poem “Covered Wagon” imagery in Chapter 19, where the speaker “covered your wagon with canvas.”

Prompt 2: Byrdie Lee Howell Langon and the Act of Looking “Far Enough”

Why this matters
Chapter 3 names the entire collection’s central ethical demand: to see past surface weakness toward hidden beauty. Byrdie’s role as self-published historian and Jerry Ford’s poem establish what the poet owes her ancestors.

Sample thesis direction
Cortez uses Jerry Ford’s poem for Byrdie to define “far enough” as a method of witness that refuses superficial judgment, a stance the collection then applies to every erased Black Westerner.

Evidence leads

Ford’s poem draws out “all the beautiful things that many / have not looked far enough / to find” (Chapter 3).
Byrdie self‑published Utah and the Early Black Settlers (Chapter 3).
The Author’s Note credits Byrdie’s book as a source (Chapter 2).
Compare to the speaker’s act of searching ancestors in “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface” (Chapter 48), where tools include “expert, archive, attic, passed word, hunch, self.”

Prompt 3: The Two‑Selves Strategy in “I’m Forced to Imagine There Are Two of Me Here”

Why this matters
Chapter 11 dramatizes the psychological cost of assimilation by literally splitting the speaker into two figures: the compliant public self (Rio) and the hidden, intimate self (The Dark). This poem is the collection’s most explicit treatment of dual identity.

Sample thesis direction
In “I’m Forced to Imagine There Are Two of Me Here,” Cortez portrays assimilation as a violent internal theatre where one self disciplines the other, yet the final gesture of mercy toward a deer suggests that integration, not erasure, remains possible.

Evidence leads

The speaker “call her Rio” and instructs her to “remind them of our one white grandmother” to pass.
The two selves close a bedroom door and touch intimately.
After hitting a deer, they “show each other mercy” and share a bite of cracked rib.
Cross‑reference the Orion poem (Chapter 12), where the speaker has “two birth stories”—one with a mother and one without.

Prompt 4: Ecological Grief as a Structural Thread in “Like a Suggestion”

Why this matters
Chapter 7 shifts the collection’s focus from personal memory to planetary decay, listing disrupted animal behaviors as tentative signs of collapse. This poem functions as an early warning that later personal concerns are nested within a wider environmental crisis.

Sample thesis direction
Cortez uses the accumulation of anomalous animal events in “Like a Suggestion” to establish ecological grief as a constant pressure on the speaker’s inner life, making the later poems about motherhood and home more urgent.

Evidence leads

Antelope die on Antelope Island; wolves hunt bison in spring; salmon fail to return.
The cat stands at an open door but runs when the speaker approaches.
The title “Like a Suggestion” implies these signs are tentative but accumulating.
Later nature poems (“Salt,” Chapter 16; “Eden,” Chapter 49) return to the idea of the land as wounded or ambiguous.

Prompt 5: The Body as Site of Witness and Transformation in “Salt”

Why this matters
In Chapter 16, the speaker sheds her physical body on the Great Salt Lake flats and performs a ritual transformation. The poem uses the lake’s hypersaline biology as a metaphor for how the Black body can become evidence of survival.

Sample thesis direction
By crushing brine‑shrimp skeletons, eating dormant eggs, and folding her shadow as evidence, the speaker in “Salt” turns the lake into a laboratory of bodily reclamation, arguing that survival itself is a form of documentation.

Evidence leads

The speaker “slip[s] the silksac of my body” and walks onto the flats.
She reaches into the red lake “as into a wound” and pulls out a string of bones.
Epigraphs from Brigham Young (“This is the place!”) and Sun Ra (“Space is the place.”) frame the poem between settlement and cosmic escape.
The closing line: “I fold the net of my shadow I hold it / as evidence.”

Prompt 6: The Car as Threshold Object in “Marion’s 1982 Chevrolet Citation”

Why this matters
Chapter 14 uses the car as a concrete symbol of impending adulthood, freedom, and self‑definition. The poem’s details—the heavy doors, the nickname “The Killing Machine,” the cosmic fish decals—make the vehicle a character in its own right.

Sample thesis direction
Cortez transforms the 1982 Chevrolet Citation into a threshold object that represents both the lure of autonomy and the fear of leaving home, with the chrome dashboard reflecting the speaker “in fraction” to signal a fragmented identity still in formation.

Evidence leads

The speaker must be “quick to leave” because the heavy doors slam shut.
Friends call it “The Killing Machine.”
Marion says “it’s like she’s been asleep for me.”
The chrome dashboard reflects the speaker in fragments: wristwatch, eyebrow, radio knob.
Days from her sixteenth birthday, she presses the accelerator and wonders “where do I go … without them.”

Prompt 7: The Two Kinds of Knowing in “What Begets What Begets”

Why this matters
Chapter 32 explicitly articulates a theory of knowledge that runs throughout the collection: some knowing is intuitive (like a mother’s love), and other knowing is submerged and must be recovered. This distinction is central to how the poet approaches ancestral memory.

Sample thesis direction
In “What Begets What Begets,” Cortez distinguishes between intimate, embodied knowing and submerged, recoverable knowing to argue that self‑worth and gratitude require active “work of knowing” against the cycle of undeservingness.

Evidence leads

The poem opens with “Everything is a ring,” establishing cyclical thinking.
The speaker describes two kinds of knowing: one “as close as my own palm” (mother’s love) and another that “gets submerged.”
Beauty strikes when it is “about to leave.”
At the mirror, the speaker does “the work of knowing” and says “thanks to someone out there.”
Compare to “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface” (Chapter 48), where the speaker loses the “impulse to keep counting” after finding emotional connection.

Prompt 8: Dissociation and the Annie Hall Intertext in Chapters 21, 23, and 26

Why this matters
Woody Allen’s Annie Hall appears as a recurring touchstone: the title “Black Annie Hall” (Chapter 21), the reference in “Black Mary Wilkie” (Chapter 23), and the explicit scene description in Chapter 26. Analyzing this intertext reveals how Cortez uses the film to explore racialized detachment and the impossibility of a simple “Annie” identity for a Black woman.

Sample thesis direction
Cortez weaponizes the Annie Hall intertext to show that the dissociative “leaving the body” that reads as quirky in the film becomes a survival tactic for Black women navigating spaces where their presence is constantly surveilled.

Evidence leads

“Black Annie Hall” (Chapter 21) features a Black woman who cannot hail a cab, whose white boyfriend asks her to stop smoking marijuana, and who drives eighty mph with “hair unmoved.”
“Black Mary Wilkie” (Chapter 23) presents a safer urban life but still ends with thinking of “that scene with the lobster.”
Chapter 26 directly adapts the body‑leaving scene: the speaker is “across from me on the 1 train” and feels the body “know[s] indifference.”
The speaker watches herself “ride shotgun” and “ghost steady through the hole in my mouth.”

Prompt 9: The Unanswerable Question as Form in “Questions of the Last Relative Slave”

Why this matters
Chapter 34 is one of the shortest poems in the book, yet it carries extraordinary weight. Asking Paul C. Howell whether he “loved the wind” after losing everything in a storm leaves the question permanently open, forcing the reader to sit with historical silence.

Sample thesis direction
Cortez uses the lyric question form in “Questions of the Last Relative Slave” to refuse false closure about enslaved interiority, arguing that the unanswerable is itself a kind of testimony to irretrievable loss.

Evidence leads

The poem directly addresses Paul C. Howell, “the last relative slave.”
Two questions: whether he rejoiced after storms finding peace in “boughless husks,” and whether he “love[s] the wind.”
No answer is given—the poem ends with a colon after the second question.
Paul C. Howell appears in the Author’s Note (Chapter 2) as the first Black police detective in Utah, making the contrast between his public achievement and private inner life stark.
Compare the questioning form to “Bellum” (Chapter 43), where a series of rhetorical questions about war also goes unanswered.

Prompt 10: The Giantess as Metaphor for Consumption and History in “The End of Eating Everything”

Why this matters
Chapter 37 introduces a surreal giantess who consumes whole bird tribes, then transforms into exhaust and black smoke. This poem inverts the power dynamic of being consumed by history or by domestic expectation, making appetite a form of agency.

Sample thesis direction
In “The End of Eating Everything,” Cortez creates a monstrous feminine figure whose total consumption is both a protest against being devoured by history and a warning about how appetite, once unleashed, destroys the self.

Evidence leads

The giantess opens her mouth and “takes whole bird tribes in one bite.”
She appears as a pretty girl before revealing her colossal form.
Her belly is lined with “woolly afghans from my grandmother’s house”—domestic comfort turned inside out.
She has eaten even the front porch.
The poem ends: “Why don’t they see me coming,” suggesting the speaker’s transformation is invisible to others.
Compare to “Self-Portrait in a Tanning Bed” (Chapter 20), where the speaker also undergoes a bodily transformation and considers mortality.

Prompt 11: Maternal Ambivalence in “Fear of Motherhood” and “Écriture Féminine”

Why this matters
Two poems—Chapter 46 (“Fear of Motherhood”) and Chapter 35 (“Écriture Féminine”)—directly address the tension between love and selfishness, protection and control, connection and detachment in the mother‑child relationship. Together they offer a layered portrait of maternal ambivalence that resists sentimentalism.

Sample thesis direction
Cortez juxtaposes the anxiety of anticipated motherhood in “Fear of Motherhood” with the confessed selfishness of actual motherhood in “Écriture Féminine” to argue that maternal love is always shadowed by the mother’s fear of her own inadequacy and her narcissistic mirroring of the child.

Evidence leads

In “Fear of Motherhood” (Chapter 46), the speaker feels nothing watching sea turtles lay eggs until a stranger gasps, revealing her emotional flatness.
She worries she will look at her child with the same detached anxiety she felt at Sacré‑Coeur.
In “Écriture Féminine” (Chapter 35), the speaker admits: “I was selfish enough / that you were born.”
The speaker braids her child’s hair but acknowledges she is “in love with the me in you.”
“Maternal Instinct” (Chapter 29) offers a third angle: the speaker hears a child’s cries but cannot decide whether to run toward or stay still.

Prompt 12: The Ending as Refusal of Closure in “Eden” and the Penguin Poets List

Why this matters
The book’s final two chapters (49 and 50) resist traditional closure. “Eden” places the speaker at a kitchen window, uncertain whether she is home or visiting, and then announces she is “really leaving now.” The Penguin Poets list that follows is a bibliography, not a farewell poem. Together they argue that the story continues through literary community rather than individual resolution.

Sample thesis direction
By ending with a domestic scene of departure followed by a list of poets, Cortez rejects the idea that a single life story can be resolved, instead proposing that the Black poetic tradition itself becomes the ongoing container for Afropioneer memory.

Evidence leads

In “Eden” (Chapter 49), the speaker washes her daughter’s dishes and watches an elk, asking “am I home or am I visiting.”
The “snow cup” has melted into the “summer people” they truly are.
The speaker acknowledges she is “really leaving now, moving through the told story of my life.”
Chapter 50 is a straight bibliography of Penguin Poets titles, including Golden Ax itself.
The list positions Cortez’s work within a lineage, not as a conclusion.
Revisit the epigraph (Chapter 1): Nat Love’s vision of the Great Salt Lake is interrupted by a conductor’s call, pulling the reader back to earth—a similar gesture of refusing dreamy closure.

For further study, see the Questions and Answers page or explore specific characters and themes.