Roxane Gay continues to laud Rio Cortez’s forthcoming debut poetry collection, GOLDEN AX. In a Goodreads review, Gay praised the collection as “outstanding,”adding: “The poetry in these pages is intelligent, lyrical, as invested in the past as the present and future with witty nods to pop culture.” The collection also received a glowing blurb from Ross Gay, which reads: “I love—I mean, I love this book—for its sensuous, chiseled language; ...for its weird and brainy sense of humor; for its palpable yearning and need; and for its entangled, complicated, unfixable, and unfixing blackness... I am so grateful for this book, and this voice, and this heart, in the world.” Penguin Books will publish GOLDEN AX on August 30, 2022.