Postcolonial Love Poem Poems

Natalie Diaz's second poetry collection treats desire as a stand against erasure. Its poems ask that every body on the page be touched and held as beloved: bodies of language, land and rivers, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers.

The poems speak from inside a nation whose founding depended on diminishing people like the poet and those she loves. Wounds that America inflicted on an indigenous people are allowed to bloom into pleasure and tenderness. Anxiety is renamed desire, and then a garden.

Indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women's bodies appear as both the body politic and the body ecstatic. Language is pushed toward its dark edges, into dunefields and forests where love and pleasure hold grief and joy, violence and sensuality together. The voice can be plain and pleading, as in the line asking to be lonely but not invisible.

The book won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. It follows When My Brother Was an Aztec, an American Book Award winner.

The collection takes apart ideas of American goodness. In its place it builds a future out of the choices made now, and Diaz chooses love.