Originally published in 2013, When My Brother Was An Aztec serves to remind us of Natalie Diaz’s singular talent. It is rare that debut collections arrive as assuredly as this, and even rarer for them to do so while covering such a wide range of subjects, including race, identity, familial love, addiction, poverty, literary history, and pop culture.

A lot of the poems forthrightly deal with painful personal experiences: the emotional core of the collection deals with Diaz’s family, particularly her brother and his addiction to drugs. We watch as he loses his innocence, and we see the circumstances that made it happen. Diaz manages to write about this with touching honesty. never teetering over into sentimentality, and although these are inward subjects, the poems always feel outward-looking.

If there is a problem, it is that Diaz almost has too many ideas; the emotional power of the poems about her family becomes diluted by the sometimes-unrelated poems that surround them. Nevertheless, When My Brother Was An Aztec marked out Diaz as a poet with intelligence to match her huge ambition, it also set the stage for the torrent of sustained brilliance she produced next, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Postcolonial Love Poem.