Book
Postcolonial love poem
Publication Information
Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, [2020]
Physical Description
105 pages ; 23 cm
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: "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--a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love."
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.