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I happened upon this book while looking through the overstock section of my local bookstore. At first I was drawn to the cover, then while flipping through the pages I spotted "Brigham Young," "Mormons" and "Salt Lake City" in the text. It turns out this was a collection of poetry written by a black woman raised in Utah.

What were the chances that the first book I picked up and paged through would be about this? It's been a few weeks since then and I can't say. Regardless I knew it was coming home with me.

The book is divided into three sections, and it is mainly the first that reckons with a young black girl coming of age in a predominantly white and overly patriarchal culture that made her feel like a literal alien. The second follows her experiences as an adult in New York, but the whiteness that surrounds her keeps asserting itself. It often surfaces in the pop culture references she uses as a framework for her pieces- Woody Allen, Nancy Meyers, Frasier- following her into the final third.

Reading and fully understanding poetry has never been my strong suit, regardless of whether I read it silently or out loud. What I gathered from this was someone trying to reconcile their identity in situations where they are repeatedly obscured and can't see themselves. In some of the poems I get the sense that there is so much missing information in her family history that grasping a fully formed identity (past, present, future) seems impossible. How can you be a fully formed human being when you have been robbed of history and context?

There may not be answers to that question by the end of Golden Ax, but these are questions worth asking.