Postcolonial love poem

Title:

Author:

Diaz, Natalie, author.

ISBN:

9781644450147

Personal Author:

Diaz, Natalie, author.

Uniform Title:

Poems. Selections

Publication Information:

Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2020.

Physical Description:

105 pages ; 23 cm

Contents:

Postcolonial love poem -- Blood-light -- These hands, if not Gods -- Catching copper -- From the desire field -- Manhattan is a lenape word -- American arithmetic -- They don't love you like I love you -- Skin-light -- Run'n'gun -- Asterion's lament -- Like church -- Wolf OR-7 -- Ink-light -- The mustangs -- Ode to the beloved's hips -- Top ten reasons why Indians are good at basketball -- That which cannot be stilled -- The first water is the body -- I, minotaur -- It was the animals -- How the milky way was made -- Exhibits from The American water museum -- Isn't the air also a body, moving? -- Cranes, mafiosos, and a polaroid camera -- The cure for melancholy is to take the horn -- Waist and sway -- If I should come upon your house lonely in the west Texas desert -- Snake-light -- My brother, my wound -- Grief work.

Abstract:

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.

Language:

English

Subject Term:

American poetry -- 21st century.

Love poetry, American.

Genre:

Poetry.

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Call Number	Status
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Summary

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.

Reviews (1)

Booklist Review

Diaz follows her stellar debut, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), with another groundbreaking collection. Diaz's electrifying poems buzz with erotic energy in lines that whisper privately to a lover ("Imparadise me.") but also confront intensely complicated notions of attraction, often framed against this country's ongoing imperialism: "an American drone finds then loves / a body." Throughout, Diaz paints vivid landscapes, from the intimate, "middle-night cosmography of your moving hands" to the linguistic cartography of "Manhattan Is a Lenape Word." As in her previous book, the speaker's brother appears, as do other relations from her Mojave community, most notably in a series of prose reflections on the importance of basketball to reservation life: "Only a tribal kid's shot has an arc made of sky." Entire dissertations could be written about Diaz's uses of light and color in this book's lithe lyrics, from the exacting, evocative imagery ("My brothers' bullet is dressed / for a red carpet / in a copper jacket") to the book's many corporal illuminations: "Blood-Light," "Skin-Light," "Snake-Light." An unparalleled lyric work, with one of the sexiest lines of poetry ever penned, "in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake."