Postcolonial Love Poem: Poems

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

Natalie Diaz's highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages--bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers--be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: "Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden." In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: "I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible." Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope--in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

Author: Natalie Diaz
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 03/03/2020
Pages: 80
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.4lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.80w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781644450147


Award: Stonewall Book Award - Honor Book
Award: Pulitzer Prize - Winner
Award: National Book Awards - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 12/16/2019
Booklist 03/01/2020 pg. 9

About the Author
Natalie Diaz is the author of the poetry collection When My Brother Was an Aztec. She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She teaches at Arizona State University.