Postcolonial love poem

Title:

Title:

Postcolonial love poem

Poems. Selections

Love poem

Personal Author:

Diaz, Natalie,

ISBN:

9781644450147

OCLC#:

on1102159836

Language:

English

Genre:

Poetry.

Subjects:

Indians of North America -- Poetry.

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.

Summary:

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.

Format:

Book

Award:

National Book Awards finalist, 2020.

Pulitzer Prize, Poetry, 2021.

Length:

105 pages ;

Copies:

Available:*

Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Non-Fiction	811 D539p	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

Bound With These Titles

On Order

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.

Author Notes

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.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this exquisite, electrifying collection, Diaz (When My Brother Was an Aztec) studies the body through desire and the preservation of Native American lives and cultures, suggesting that to exist as a Native in a world with a history of colonization and genocide is itself a form of protest and celebration. She explores this idea in "The First Water Is the Body," cataloguing the destruction of this invaluable resource by those who seek to protect it: "in the U.S., we are tear-gassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling natives trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock." But it's desire, both in its erotic form and as present in the will to assimilate, that drives the book: "Like any desert, I learn myself by what's desired of me--/ and I am demoned by those desires." "These Hands, If Not Gods" opens with a stunning lyrical address to a lover: "Haven't they moved like rivers--/ like glory, like light--/ over the seven days of your body?" The elegiac "Grief Work" closes the book with a meditation on longing: "my melancholy is hoofed./ I, the terrible beautiful// Lampon, a shining devour-horse tethered at the bronze manger of her collarbones." Diaz continues to demonstrate her masterful use of language while reinventing narratives about desire. (Mar.)

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."