Golden Ax Quiz: How Well Do You Know Rio Cortez’s Afrofrontier Poetry?

Golden Ax Quiz

Welcome to the comprehensive quiz on Rio Cortez’s Golden Ax. This collection blends autobiography, history, and Afropioneer imagination across 50 poems. The quiz below covers the full arc of the book, from the author’s family origins to the final list of Penguin Poets. For deeper study, explore the book summary and discussion questions.

The quiz is divided into four sections: Plot and Sequence (8 questions), Character Motivation (5 questions), Theme and Symbol (4 questions), and Synthesis (3 questions). Questions mix multiple-choice and short-answer formats. The complete answer key with explanations follows the quiz.

Plot and Sequence (8 Questions)

1. In “Covered Wagon as Spaceship,” the speaker concludes that the story of Black arrival in the West begins with:

   • A) migration
   • B) abduction
   • C) gold rush
   • D) exploration

2. Which historical figure does the speaker directly address in “Questions of the Last Relative Slave”?

   • A) Abner Howell
   • B) Byrdie Langon
   • C) Paul C. Howell
   • D) Jerry Ford

3. (Short answer) In the poem “As Cain,” the speaker references which Mormon doctrine about Black people?

4. What object does the speaker break in “Dishwashing the Mammy Salt & Pepper Shakers by Accident”?

   • A) a vase
   • B) a window
   • C) a bow
   • D) salt and pepper shakers

5. (Short answer) In “Partum,” the speaker addresses a figure called “Little God, Oldest Friend.” What specific memory does the speaker recall about this figure?

6. (Short answer) The poem “Bellum” asks whether defeated enemies should keep their names or be renamed by whom?

7. In “Visiting Whitney Plantation,” the speaker searches for ancestors’ names on what?

   • A) a cemetery headstone
   • B) a marble wall of seventy thousand first names
   • C) a plaque
   • D) a book

8. In “The End of Eating Everything,” the giantess speaker’s belly is lined with what?

   • A) leaves
   • B) silk
   • C) woolly afghans from her grandmother’s house
   • D) feathers

Character Motivation (5 Questions)

1. (Short answer) Why does Abner Howell’s conversion to Mormonism create complex tensions within the speaker’s family?

2. In “I learn to shoot a bow,” why does the speaker imagine herself as Orion?

   • A) because Orion is a constellation
   • B) because her grandfather carved the bow
   • C) because Orion has two conflicting birth stories
   • D) because Orion is a hunter

3. In “Double Threat,” what prompts the narrator to spit near her partner’s feet?

   • A) jealousy over a woman in a red dress
   • B) anger at a white woman’s question
   • C) frustration with her mother
   • D) fear of dogs

4. (Short answer) In “Fear of Motherhood,” what specific fear does the speaker have about how she will relate to her future child?

5. (Short answer) In “Black Annie Hall,” the speaker fails to hail a cab after leaving her analyst’s appointment. What does this moment reveal about her experience?

Theme and Symbol (4 Questions)

1. (Short answer) In “North Node,” what does the “scorpion” symbol represent in the speaker’s life?

2. In “I learn to shoot a bow,” the canal is compared to the speaker’s mother. What quality do they share?

   • A) being deep and dangerous
   • B) being sparkling and clear
   • C) being low and unnamed but fullest after rain
   • D) being polluted

3. (Short answer) In “Salt,” what does the speaker pull out of the red lake?

4. (Short answer) In “Dishwashing the Mammy Salt & Pepper Shakers by Accident,” the broken shakers are said to go “into forgetting.” What does this act symbolize?

Synthesis (3 Questions)

1. (Short answer) How does the speaker’s experience in “UFO, for Instance” (a feeling of self-dissolution and the limits of knowledge) connect to the collection’s larger exploration of the unknown?

2. (Short answer) Compare the use of sci-fi imagery in “Covered Wagon as Spaceship” and “Self-Portrait in a Tanning Bed.” How does each poem reframe Black identity through a speculative lens?

3. (Short answer) In the Author’s Note, Rio Cortez defines “Afropioneerism.” How does the poem “To Salt Lake, Letter Regarding Genealogy” embody this concept?

Answer Key

1. B) abduction
The poem ends with the line “the story / begins with abduction,” reframing Black arrival as forced and alienating.

2. C) Paul C. Howell
The poem is explicitly “For Paul C. Howell,” the last relative who was enslaved.

3. The Mormon preexistence doctrine that Black people were neutral in a pre-mortal conflict and therefore cursed as descendants of Cain.
The poem references this doctrine directly and then gardens with the image of Abel’s blood.

4. D) salt and pepper shakers
The poem describes accidentally breaking a pair of Mammy stereotyped shakers while washing them.

5. Being served sarsaparilla in the towns of Loa or Escalante.
The speaker wonders if that encounter was with the “Little God, Oldest Friend.”

6. The victor
The poem asks “Do we keep / Their names / Or call them / By our own,” leaving the moral calculus unresolved.

7. B) a marble wall of seventy thousand first names
The speaker wipes sweat from her brow while searching for ancestors’ names on the memorial wall.

8. C) woolly afghans from her grandmother’s house
The poem states “my belly lined with woolly afghans / from my grandmother’s house and yours.”

9. Because the LDS church banned Black men from holding the priesthood until 1978, so Abner’s faith created conflict between religious belonging and racial identity.
The Author’s Note explains this tension and its lasting impact on the family.

10. C) because Orion has two conflicting birth stories
The poem says “I am Orion. With two birth stories,” mirroring the speaker’s own denial of a clear beginning.

11. A) jealousy over a woman in a red dress
The narrator asks if her partner wants to have sex with a gap-toothed woman in a red dress, hoping to force an admission of rejection.

12. That she will look at her child with the same detached anxiety she feels in beautiful moments (like watching sea turtles or the Sacré-Coeur), unable to feel awe.
The poem contrasts expected wonder with the speaker’s worry about her own protective instincts.

13. Racial friction in everyday urban life; despite her leisure, she is not granted the same ease as a white person.
The poem interweaves mundane acts with subtle racism, echoed by the failure to hail a cab.

14. The scorpion represents an internal desire or karmic struggle that “clings” to the speaker and ignites longing, even in a loving home.
The speaker must learn to “cut the scorpion from [her] throat.”

15. C) being low and unnamed but fullest after rain
The poem states “It’s a canal. Not unlike my mother: / low as it want to be and fullest when / it rains.”

16. A string of bones
The speaker reaches into the red lake “as into a wound” and pulls out a string of bones, becoming “two times the dark.”

17. The act symbolizes quiet resistance against racist household objects and the erasure of harmful stereotypes. By breaking them, the speaker participates in forgetting.
The poem’s final line “into forgetting” implies an intentional letting go.

18. Both the poem and the collection use natural and liminal imagery to explore the boundaries of knowledge, self-dissolution, and the unknown. In “UFO, for Instance,” the speaker’s perception widens into a cosmos and then vanishes, mirroring the book’s recurring questions about history, identity, and what cannot be known.
The chapter’s allusion to UFOs frames the unknown as both terrifying and liberating.

19. “Covered Wagon as Spaceship” uses the science-fiction trope of abduction to reframe the forced migration of Black people to the West as an alienating, involuntary event. “Self-Portrait in a Tanning Bed” uses a tanning bed as a time machine, making the speaker appear darker and “like a time traveler,” playing with racial identity through a sci-fi lens. Both poems employ speculative imagery to disrupt conventional narratives of Black history and embodiment.
The tanning bed poem explicitly mentions the speaker liking her “time-traveler appearance.”

20. The poem reinterprets Mormon pioneer history through the voice of a Black female speaker who “build[s] for the city” and declares “I have built for you.” She transforms into a quarry, steals sandstone and quartz, and becomes the “Guard-thing of the White city,” merging labor, faith, and genealogy. This directly embodies Afropioneerism as defined in the Author’s Note: claiming a space and name for Black pioneers through both physical and spiritual imagination.
The chapter uses salt flat imagery and a crow-headed goddess mother to ground the speaker’s ancestral work.

For more on the book’s final sequence, see the ending explained.