Natalie Diaz, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2012 Narrative Prize, is the author of the poetry collections When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem. A Mojave and Pima tribe member, she grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed an MFA at Old Dominion University. Diaz lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.


2021 PULITZER
PRIZE WINNER

Downhill Triolets

Poetry

by Natalie Diaz


In a show-stopping performance, award-winning poet Natalie Diaz uncorks the love and pathos in her hapless brother’s story of drugs, recurrent arrests, and hallucinatory identification with a native ancestor and a rock-and-roll hero. It’s always good to see and hear a remarkable poet read her stuff, and Diaz, in both her writing and her delivery, stands with the best. Get ready for a good ride, and enjoy!



VIDEO


“Downhill Triolets Preview” (0:18)


In a show-stopping performance, award-winning poet Natalie Diaz uncorks the love and pathos in her hapless brother’s story of drugs, recurrent arrests, and hallucinatory identification with a native ancestor and a rock and roll hero. It’s always good to see and hear a remarkable poet read her stuff, and Diaz, in both her writing and her delivery, stands with the best. Get ready for a good ride, and enjoy!


VIDEO


“Downhill Triolet” (5:23)



1. My Dad, Sisyphus, and My Brother

The phone rings—my brother was arrested again.
Dad hangs up, gets his old blue Chevy going,

    and heads to the police station.
It’s not the first time. It’s not even the second.
No one is surprised when my brother is arrested again.
The guy fell on my knife was his one-phone-call explanation.
(He stabbed a man five times in the back is the official accusation.)

People on couch
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