Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
Finalist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection
An Atlantic Best American Poetry Collection of the 21st Century

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.