Postcolonial Love Poem

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Call Number: Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Plays & Poetry / Diaz, Natalie
On Shelf At: Malletts Creek Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Plays & Poetry / Diaz, Natalie	4-week checkout	On Shelf

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.
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.

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Beautiful submitted by samanthar on September 29, 2020, 9:47am In her second published work, Postcolonial Love Poem, Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz lyrically tells readers what was stolen - bodies, land, love, rivers, language - by colonialism. While her work features heavily the themes of loss and othering, she does not dwell in wishing for a pre-colonial world. Her prose pushes readers to her present day brothers and sisters, how they walk with living wounds across polluted land. Diaz’s work is powerful and unlike any other I have read, juxtaposing facts

Postcolonial Love Poem cover“Native Americans make up less than

1 percent of the population of America.

0.8 percent of 100 percent.” (American Arithmetic)

with shadows of violence

“My brothers have

a bullet.

They keep their bullet

on a leash shiny

as a whip of blood.” (Catching Copper)

with dizzying sensuality

“I want her green life. Her inside me

In a green hour I can’t stop.

Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth” (Desire Field)

Diaz's unique use of language tells a powerful story of reclamation, celebration, loss, and life. One of my favorite pieces in the collection is “exhibits from The American Water Museum”. It is the longest piece featured, and one of the hardest hitting. It jumps both in time and space to poisoned water in Flint, to US companies owning rights to water in South America, to imagery of the necessity of water to life, all making the point that bodies are water, and to use water is to use life. Throughout the collection, Diaz seamlessly weaves the stories of ancestors, contemporaries, and the environment, bringing them all together to tell a rich postcolonial love poem.