Histories of the Future Frontier

The classic Black adage—that we must work twice as hard to be successful—becomes doubly perilous when one tacks on the operative phrase at living. These are the existential stakes underlying Golden Ax (Penguin Poets, 2022), Rio Cortez’s beautiful and deeply thoughtful debut collection about Black frontiers, both tangible and figurative.

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Cortez is a former Cave Canem fellow and has an MFA from New York University. She has written a chapbook (I Have Learned to Define a Field As a Space Between Mountains, 2016), a picture book in verse (The ABCs of Black History, 2020), and has another forthcoming (The River Is My Sea, 2024), all while working a day job in publishing.

In Golden Ax, Afropioneerism and Afrofrontierism—Cortez’s efforts at contextualizing Utah’s terrain for its Black residents—document a settler’s history not readily advertised while also drawing a line of agency from Cortez’s forebears to her present. Beyond its comfort with aesthetic theory, Golden Ax is also impressive in that Cortez’s reality doesn’t come at the expense of what came before her. No one who has had to endure the brutal realignment from slavery to freedom, or from wilderness to settlement, deserves judgement—just understanding and empathy.

The collection also features what, to this writer, is the stanza of the year:

I sidestep a white man with a camera
so that I can take my mother’s
hand from her mouth and hold it

Appearing toward the middle of “Visiting Whitney Plantation,” the lines separate voyeurism and generational trauma while entrenching a hereditary duty to serve as caretaker in such instances. The moment takes on added poignancy when one learns in Cortez’s “Author’s Note” that her family was enslaved in Louisiana (where the Whitney Plantation is) prior to moving west to Utah during Reconstruction. That the book feels unabashedly specific while still charting a broader American story is but one of many reasons why the collection is poised for sustained readings.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you talk about the genesis of Afropioneerism and Afrofrontierism?

I think Afropioneerism may be out in the world, but it came naturally to me because pioneer is a word that’s ubiquitous in Utah. They're really proud of their pioneering history: pioneer parades, pioneer parks, pioneer museums. The subtext is religious pioneers, but there's also some conversation about—and some archival record of—what Mormons refer to as “Negro pioneers.” So, I've always thought of my family as Negro pioneers. That was actually what they were called by a lot of Mormon writers and people in the community. Afropioneerism, for me, is sort of about the act of Black folks venturing into the unknown, but it felt like a pretty natural synthesis of words given the language that I came up around.

It’s the same for Afrofrontierism, I suppose. The West is the quintessential frontier, but it's interesting to think of any family that was enslaved in America and where they decided to go after enslavement, or think about what they were able to do after. This was the choice—the frontier that my family chose to approach when they had freedom to do so. Thinking about that, as Afrofrontierism, felt appropriate to our lineage.

Do you see these concepts, at least as far as the writing is concerned, in conversation with Afrofuturism or Afropessimism?

I definitely do. I thought about Afrofuturism a lot. There are some Afrofuturist artists that play into the book directly. There’s an acrostic poem after Wangechi Mutu, for example, and there's an epigraph from Sun Ra, and, certainly, if you think about Octavia Butler as Afrofuturist there’s a reference in one of the poems to Kindred.

I think frontier and future—these places that aren't here, places that are somewhere else, somewhere where you're not subjugated, where there's maximum freedom—are extremely compelling to people who have come from a history of enslavement.

It seems like what you're doing is more intentionally recuperative, like trying to create a space versus thinking out into space. Or, in the case of Afropessimism, adopting an essentialist worldview.

That's a really thoughtful reading of what's happening in a lot of the poems. That was sort of the emotional backdrop. The reason I wrote the poems at all was in an effort to recuperate from my reality.

When you say reality, do you mean being isolated as a Black person within this predominantly white space?

That's definitely what I mean. I just tried to put that together for myself for a long time, you know, but that’s also what I imagine my ancestors doing. So, the project of thinking about them and researching them—all of it felt recuperative. I’m recuperating from a place like Louisiana, which is where my family came from. And then once I’m in Utah, there's an amount of recuperating, to use your word again, that I’m able to do in this landscape that feels extremely sublime, but it’s also challenging socially. And it's a place where I don't have the community that I might have anywhere else when you’re Black.

I want to talk a bit about the collection’s structure. In “The Negro Pioneer” section, there’s the idea that if you see nothing of yourself in your environment, then it’s natural to identify with pop cultural figures. It’s like an augmentation of white spaces to suit a Black reality. But that shifts in “Frontier Elsewhere,” with the introduction of agency—or the creation of something new. Is that right?

That sounds about right, especially in terms of an arc toward agency. But just to talk candidly about what it’s like to structure a book: I wrote these poems over 10 years, and I feel like it would have been really restrictive to think about the structure of the book when I was writing.

When it came down to choosing which poems would go into the final manuscript, it felt like it could have been all poems like in the first section ["Space Between Mountains"], in a way, but I felt like it was important to have the augmentation that you're talking about in the second section with Frasier Crane and Nancy Meyers. That felt like such a recuperative practice for me in real life, in real-time, as an adult. So much of the rest of the book happens in my adolescence and is looking back trying to sort of piece together a narrative. Not only a personal narrative, but an ancestral narrative, a historical narrative.

The book came together kind of instinctively. And I tried to be honest about the emotional half of the poems also, so that's kind of how they're ordered. But your impression of it is exactly how I would want it to be read.

I was also moved by the poems with backstory introductions. I thought about Gwendolyn Brooks there, but it also made me think of William Carlos Williams in Patterson, where it's more biographical information about New Jersey. As a form, do you see those intros as scene-setting, or biographical context, or a little bit of both?

That felt pretty biographical to me, but I also feel like context for some of this is really—it's just necessary. I hate to think of poetry as like, “Oh, I need to provide extra context.” But this book has a lot of extra context. The poems could stand on their own, but I think they’re enriched a lot by understanding Mormonism, or the history of Utah, or facts about Utah. It just seems like such a specific subculture that also, in itself, feels like poetry. Every time I think about the idiosyncrasies of this place, they feel poetic in and of themselves. So, biographical, but also critical for a full understanding of the work.

Were you raised Mormon?

I was not raised Mormon. In Utah, Mormonism is so pervasive that if you’re not raised Mormon, in some ways you’re raised in direct opposition to Mormonism.

What is your relationship to religion?

My grandparents were evangelicals, but my parents weren’t religious people. I went to Catholic school because a lot of kids in Salt Lake City who aren't Mormon go to Catholic school. The public school is super Mormon. There’s just very little separation between church and state, so it’s almost like going to a secular school. Our Catholic school had Jewish students and Muslim students—I think all people who weren’t interested in having a Mormon public education—so I was raised in that environment of other families and adolescents who felt marginalized by a ubiquitous fake majority here in Salt Lake City.

That's kind of how Salt Lake City feels in relation to the rest of Utah. When I was growing up, Salt Lake was 40 percent Mormon but if you drove 30 minutes in any direction, it was 90 percent. So, yeah, I’m very aware of the tenets of Mormonism and the practices, but I don’t participate in them.

You're looking at all of these issues not just from a secular perspective, but also from another shade of otherness. Not white and then not Mormon. It's double duty in terms of trying to figure out this stuff.

Exactly. It was just one other way to be other.

I do have one relative who was Mormon, my great-grandfather, and his Mormon testimony is actually super important to the church. I'm writing a little bit about him now in a nonfiction project. He is an aberration in our family but his Mormonism gave him a lot of opportunities that other people in the Black community at that time didn't have.

You mention him in your author’s note.

Abner Howell. He’s a well-known Black Mormon here in the state.

I’m really interested in the form you use in “UFO, For Instance,” and in other poems, in which there are these big spaces between words. They’re really sharp in terms of your line breaks, but also in terms of the implied breaths and how they approach negative space in stanzas. Is that a novel form?

That was a freestyle in terms of form. It's just what felt right for the poem instinctively, but also creating that space feels like a good compromise between punctuation and alignment, and a new line.

Do you lean more toward poems intended to be spoken?

I do think speaking poetry is an important part of my writing process. I'm always reading aloud as I write because I think sound is important. The sound instructs your line breaks and the structure of your poem. In that way, it’s pretty organic. But the collection also has a lot of sonnets, so that is one form I do. I just feel really comfortable there.

What attracts you to the sonnet as a form?

It's so forgiving, but it also has a little tightness. People break sonnets all the time. Some of the sonnets in [Golden Ax] are actually the right amount of syllables and iambs, but a lot of them are broken, which I really believe in. I don't think you should ever force a poem into a form if the poem wants an elbow out, or needs to be one syllable longer. It just needs that. But the sonnet is the perfect amount of lines; there's still an equity of language there, an economy of language, but it forces me to write longer, because I have a tendency to write really short poems. It pushes me a few lines in, and I also think it holds people back in a nice way. And there aren’t that many rules, really. The rules that do exist can justifiably be broken and still make good sonnets.

How did you wind up in New York from Utah. Did you go for college or were you just looking for a change?

My dad is Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, so I always had a relationship to New York visiting my family there. But, I mean, it was all part of my plan as a child. I went to Sarah Lawrence and stayed.

I spend summers here in Utah, which feels like the perfect balance. But I have some roots there [in New York], so it felt like it was OK to transition that way.

And you work in publishing there?

I work at HarperCollins to create more opportunities for BIPOC authors. But I’ve had a long career in publishing: over 12 years at different houses. Before Harper I took a little four-year hiatus to work at the Schomburg Center. I worked there under Kevin Young, and then I went back into publishing during the pandemic.

How does working in publishing affect your writing?

I don't think of it as an asset in the way that I might if I were a professor, for example.

That’s interesting. In theory it’s good to be around books all the time, but in practice you’re not working on your own book if you’re working on other people’s. Toni Morrison is the big exception, but there’s also someone like Philip Larkin, who was a librarian.

Toni Morrison—thank God for that example. It makes a lot of sense to get into publishing if you're interested in writing books. It's just kind of a brutal place to be when you're trying to figure yourself out as a writer.

In terms of the pace? Or because of what the expectations are?

Just watching your dreams come true for other writers. And this is the thing that I feel really passionate about. My job is to sort of shepherd books into the world for other people. There’s something really beautiful about that, and satisfying and exciting and creative and interesting—but it's also brutal if that's what you want [for yourself].

I fell into criticism out of my MFA program, and I looked up and all my friends were putting out books. I was like, “Nooooooo!” And you’re happy for people, right? But it’s just a different feeling.

It’s a yearning. It’s like a constant yearning.