Postcolonial Love Poem
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.
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Community Reviews
I completed this book knowing this one thing to be true:
Natalie Díaz loves herself some thighs and hips.
I'm kidding. Although thighs and hips do make many an appearance.
I really liked this. I listened to the poet read a couple of her own poems first and found it helped me to read the others, as I mostly like to read poetry collections out loud. Much of this was admittedly over my head, but I loved the beautiful words and the flow and the imagery that was extracted from those beautiful words. There were some tough themes in here, as there will be/should be from an Indigenous author - what was taken and what continues to be taken. They are presented with tenderness, heartache, anger, and bite.
There was a lot to enjoy in this collection even if I felt like an uneducated doofus in its presence. Here are some of my favorite lines from pages I dog-eared (yes, I dog-ear my poetry books - sorry not sorry):
My brothers never call the cops
on their bullet and instead pledge
allegiance to their bullet
with hands over their hearts
and stomachs and throats.
&
In the tourmaline dusk I go a same wilding path,
pulled by night's map into the forests and dunes of your hips,
divining you from rivers, then crossing them-
proving the long thirst I'd wander to be sated by you.
I confuse instinct for desire-isn't bite also touch?
&
US-headquartered companies bought the rights
to water in other countries. These companies are
strangers to the gods of those waters, were not
formed from them, have never said Gracias to
those waters, never prayed to those wateres
have never been cleansed by those waters.
The US-headquartered companies announce,
with armed guards, You can't drink from this lake
anymore. The Natives gather rain instead, open
their beautiful water-shaped mouths to the sky,
catch it in curved, peach-colored shells, in halved
gourds, in their water-shaped hands.
The companies say, Read these documents-
we bought the rain too.
We own the rain.
&
I never meant to break-
but streetlights dressed her gold.
The curve and curve of her shoulders-
the hum and hive of them,
moonglossed pillory of them-
nearly felled me to my knees.
How can I tell you-the amber of her.
The body of honey-I took it in my hands.
&
If you say to me, This is not your new house
but I am your new home,
I will enter the door of your throat,
hang my last lariat in the hallway,
built my altar of best books on your bedside table,
turn the lamp on and off, on and off, on and off.
I will lie down in you.
Eat my meals at the red table of your heart.
& (last one, I promise!)
My Elder says, You are like that rattlesnake.
She is quiet, quiet. Then she strikes, and it's too late.
You can rewrite but not unwrite.
C'mon. It's just some really great stuff.
4 Stars
Natalie Díaz loves herself some thighs and hips.
I'm kidding. Although thighs and hips do make many an appearance.
I really liked this. I listened to the poet read a couple of her own poems first and found it helped me to read the others, as I mostly like to read poetry collections out loud. Much of this was admittedly over my head, but I loved the beautiful words and the flow and the imagery that was extracted from those beautiful words. There were some tough themes in here, as there will be/should be from an Indigenous author - what was taken and what continues to be taken. They are presented with tenderness, heartache, anger, and bite.
There was a lot to enjoy in this collection even if I felt like an uneducated doofus in its presence. Here are some of my favorite lines from pages I dog-eared (yes, I dog-ear my poetry books - sorry not sorry):
My brothers never call the cops
on their bullet and instead pledge
allegiance to their bullet
with hands over their hearts
and stomachs and throats.
&
In the tourmaline dusk I go a same wilding path,
pulled by night's map into the forests and dunes of your hips,
divining you from rivers, then crossing them-
proving the long thirst I'd wander to be sated by you.
I confuse instinct for desire-isn't bite also touch?
&
US-headquartered companies bought the rights
to water in other countries. These companies are
strangers to the gods of those waters, were not
formed from them, have never said Gracias to
those waters, never prayed to those wateres
have never been cleansed by those waters.
The US-headquartered companies announce,
with armed guards, You can't drink from this lake
anymore. The Natives gather rain instead, open
their beautiful water-shaped mouths to the sky,
catch it in curved, peach-colored shells, in halved
gourds, in their water-shaped hands.
The companies say, Read these documents-
we bought the rain too.
We own the rain.
&
I never meant to break-
but streetlights dressed her gold.
The curve and curve of her shoulders-
the hum and hive of them,
moonglossed pillory of them-
nearly felled me to my knees.
How can I tell you-the amber of her.
The body of honey-I took it in my hands.
&
If you say to me, This is not your new house
but I am your new home,
I will enter the door of your throat,
hang my last lariat in the hallway,
built my altar of best books on your bedside table,
turn the lamp on and off, on and off, on and off.
I will lie down in you.
Eat my meals at the red table of your heart.
& (last one, I promise!)
My Elder says, You are like that rattlesnake.
She is quiet, quiet. Then she strikes, and it's too late.
You can rewrite but not unwrite.
C'mon. It's just some really great stuff.
4 Stars
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