Postcolonial Love Poem

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, won an American Book Award. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, as well as a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded the Holmes National Poetry Prize and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumna of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.A transformative collection of poetry that is an anthem of desire against erasure.[An] exquisite, electrifying collection. . . . Diaz continues to demonstrate her masterful use of language while reinventing
narratives about desire.This is a breakthrough collection. In a world where nothing feels so conservative as a love poem, Diaz takes the form and
smashes it to smithereens, building something all her own. A kind of love poem that can allow history and culture and the
anguish of ancestors to flow through and around the poet as she addresses her beloved.With Postcolonial Love Poem, Diaz brings her signature sharp, insightful, exquisite language to a collection about
America, about future and past, pain and ecstasy. . . . Diaz is a force, and we are all just lucky to live in a world where she
writes.Groundbreaking. . . . Entire dissertations could be written about Diaz's use of light and color in this book's lithe lyrics. . . .
An unparalleled lyric work.Diaz's collection is no doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years, one to applaud for its considerable demonstration of skill, its resistance to dominant perspectives and its light wrought of desire.WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book, an anthem of desire against erasure. It demands that every body carried in its pages - bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers - be touched and held. Here, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic, and portrayed with a glowing intimacy: the alphabet of a hand in the dark, the hips' silvered percussion, a thigh's red-gold geometry, the emerald tigers that leap in a throat. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Natalie 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. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now - how we might learn our own cures and 'go where there is love'.