Postcolonial Love Poem, the brilliant second collection from Natalie Diaz, holds in its pages the urgent appeal for all bodies―bodies of lovers, family, enemies, as well as of language and rivers and land―to be held dearly. In her lyrical landscape, Diaz tenderly prods the wounds inflicted by America onto its Indigenous peoples. When she states “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden,” Diaz allows for the sensation of pleasure to be found in pain; in asserting the autonomy found within desire, the poet simultaneously enables the bodies of Indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women to be both political and euphoric; and by forcing language to its limits, place is imbued with joy and grief, sensuality and destruction.
In this collection, Natalie Diaz opens up and confronts the conditions from which she writes, embracing bodies like hers and those she loves which have been diminished and erased. As Postcolonial Love Poem offers a picture of an America built on hope and the agency of our future choices, it is love Natalie Diaz offers most tenderly in her hands.
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“No doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years, one to applaud for its considerable demonstration of skill, its resistance to dominant perspectives, and its light wrought of desire.”
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New York Times Book Review