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A remarkable poetry collection. There is such range in these poems, stylistically, thematically. I had to look up so many words. Diaz has one hell of a vocabulary and the sound and feel of her language offers such pleasure. This is a trenchant work about culture and water and oppression and desire and family and lineage. The longer poems are really something special. The exhibits from the American Water Museum is the real standout in this collection. Excellent sophomore effort.
'Americans worship their obsessions in violent ways—they write them down.'Review to follow.
The title is apt for this one. This collection includes not only poems about romantic love, but also love for the land and water, her brother, and Native peoples. Wonderful use of language in these beautiful poems.
These poems explore Native American culture, mental illness…. discrimination, injustice, race. indigenous women, Latine culture, queer community, addictions, violence, family, love, sex, identity, intimacy, and history….. …..poems written with purpose, and powerful intentional thoughts….They feel personal, private, and raw……Gorgeously haunting and luminous prose.
I will for once agree with the blurb of a poetry collection: Postcolonial Love Poem is a thundering river of a book; I found myself drinking hungrily at the mouth of nearly every poem within. The stream of Natalie Diaz's voice flows clear and intensely lyrical, each poem an assertion of being, of beating, of grief and loss and passion and ecstacy. Each poem is, too, a body—of water, of a lover, of brownness in a land made forcibly white, of Native Americans who have long been and continue to
I first became aware of Natalie Diaz's work when I heard her read at the Cork International Poetry Festival. She held the whole audience spellbound: there was an audible intake of breath after every poem she read. Her work is fearless and passionate. As I listened to her read, I felt like she was creating a new horizon -- making a psychic space beyond anything I had experienced before. I was not the only person crying when she finished reading. So I've been anticipating this collection for a lon...
WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE for POETRY‘It is hard not to have faith in this,’ Natalie Diaz writes in her 2021 Pulitzer Prize winning collection Postcolonial Love Poem. There is a deep faith in what is possible that permeates this collection despite the deep dives of poetic investigation of colonialism that afflicts both the national level but the individual level as well. This collection is a beautiful celebration of indigenous lives while also demanding a reckoning of the loss and erasure...
Postcolonial Love Poem...The war endeddepending on which war you mean: those we started,before those, millennia ago and onward,those which started me, which I lost andwon -these ever-blooming wounds.Natalie Diaz lends a robust voice to the oppressed minority community of Native Americans - her tone is not one of bitter and acerbic criticism though, but an optimistic assertion of racial identity, memory and desire. She creates a palimpsest from a history that has been denied, an identity that has...
Phenomenal collection. Sometimes the language was so complex it did fly over my head a little bit, but I'm sure I'm going to get more from these words every single time I read them.
Diaz, raised on a Mojave reservation in California, won the Pulitzer Prize for this honey-thick exploration of queer Native American identity. There are lustful moments aplenty here—My lover comes to me like darkfall—long,and through my open window. Mullion, transom. […]I keep time on the hematite clocks of her shoulders.(from “Like Church”)—but the mineral-heavy imagery (“the agate cups of your palms …the bronzed lamp of my breast”) is so weirdly archaic and the vocabulary so technical that I k...
This just won a major award. Only which one? I can't keep track, honestly. Booker? Pulitzer? Postcolonial League? I did see, in the Acknowledgments Page, that Natalie exchanged poems via snail mail with Ada Limón, which is something Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser did, which I really love to read about because it's old school and my middle name.In any event, the Diaz book reminded me mightily of her first outing, the one with a long title about her brother, who strikes me as an endlessly fascinating...
this was very pretty, and that's all i really have to say about it.i mean, to go on, i wish this exact writer would write a novel about this exact concept. pretty prose is something i like.i don't feel that poetry should primarily be pretty. i want it to feel like i'm being stabbed in the gut.that's why i read so little poetry. one, because if it's good it will be painful, and two, because i almost never really think it's good.bottom line: i'll try again next year!----------------tbr reviewi don...
This was one of my highly anticipated reads for National Poetry Month after really loving her last collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec. There are some poems in this collection about her brother, but far more about romantic love (delightfully steamy!)... Other themes include the disappearing indigenous people (due to increasing violence and other types of erasure) and... basketball/Some of my favorites in the first reading were American Arithmetic and Ode to the Beloved's Hips.Here is a vide...
“Only a fraction / of a body, let’s say, I am only a hand— / and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover / I disappear completely.”Natalie Diaz why would you SAY THIS TO ME I am not mentally stable enough to handle it!!!!!!Some of the poems were, I felt, weighed down a bit by flowery language, so I wasn’t able to fully comprehend them (and I personally don’t prefer poems of that writing style). But I think this is a very beautiful and lyrical collection, about love and violence toward other...
Well with only a day spent listening to her, it is immediately clear to me she is one of the greatest contemporary poets I have come across so far. This collection is a masterpiece and the title poem in particular seems destined to be anthologised indefinitely. Hopefully this will end up winning all the damn prizes.
My favorite poem in this collection is "The First Water is the Body". I think everyone should read this poem, it is not only passionate, it makes you feel how urgent it is that we all see how much a part of us water is. And when she speaks of her lover, those parts are beautiful, I must keep going back to them. It´s such a beautiful collection, straight to my favorite books of poetry ever. "I arrive at you-half bestia, half feast."
With its gorgeously lyrical, shamelessly self-mythologizing expressions of eros and ecstasy, this book reminded me of what got me interested in poetry in the first place. Diaz's love poems are a worthy contribution to the great tradition of erotic verse established by the Song of Songs poet, Sappho, Mirabai, Sor Juana, et al., but they stand apart from the rest in that they are proudly, solidly positioned in the vantage of a contemporary Native American, someone with the authority to speak to th...
Miigwech to @graywolfpress for the gifted copy. “In American imaginations, the logic of this image will lend itself to surrealism or magical realism—Americans prefer a magical red Indian, or a shaman, or a fake Indian and a red dress, over a real Native. Even a real Native caring the dangerous and heavy blues of a river in her body. What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I've never been true in America. America is my myth.”Postcolonial Love Poem by queer writer Natalie Diaz (Moj...
I am a simple fiction boy, but I do like to dip my toes into the dark arts of poetry. This is an excellent collection with lean, powerful writing. I wish we had more writers like Natalie Diaz in the world.
Rich, lyrical collection of poems invoking the entire world-vein in its ambitious, occasionally sardonic, yet ultimately tender purview. These are poems of transformation and sublimation: infused with minerals, ores, gems, bodies of water, Native bodies; they dazzle and gleam with language, with science. Natural indigenous stories are excavated, their geologies and archeologies are unrooted by Diaz's encyclopaedic, masterful grasp of language, translation and myth. We breeze past Biblical, Greek...