Violence against Indigenous people is not just historical but ongoing, systemic and institutional, Diaz reminds us ... This knowledge, however fraught, emboldens Diaz to celebrate her survival as a queer Aha Makhav woman living in the 21st century ... the book rejects stereotypes that cast Indigenous people as monocultural ... Postcolonial Love Poem is charged by the often violent intersection of colonizing languages (in this case, first Spanish and then English) with an Indigenous one (Mojave). That’s not to say the poems long for a pre-colonial culture ... There is an extreme lushness to the language Diaz uses, especially about love, sex and desire ... This book asks us to read the world carefully, knowing that not everything will be translated for us, knowing that it is made up of pluralities ... 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.
It’s poetry as myth-making in order to flesh out experiences that the predominately white gatekeepers of the mainstream publishing world have seldom given the attention and audience they have always deserved. Yes, this collection is postcolonial. And yes, it is one long love poem—the bliss and thirst brought by the body of the beloved run through these poems like the copper arroyos flash-flooding through the book’s intimate and vast desert landscape .... For this reader, it was a revelation—bringing to the center of awareness a tumultuous, gorgeous rapture, in which two women contain and then explode the earth and the universe itself ... utterly corporeal and unforgettable ... Lest one think this book is all fire, light, and fury, there is a sly humor that edges in ... It’s a pleasure (and perhaps a momentary relief) to find oneself chuckling out loud at these witty and yet wickedly apt commentaries. This is stunning work—painful, embodied, and glorious.
Conveying clear ideas through crisp, dazzling images, Diaz’s poems typically unfold in long lines grouped into short stanzas. She instructs and inquires; she mourns and rhapsodises ... Despite the difficulty of breaking free of this fable, the balance of love poems in this book are truly intimate, electric transmissions from one to another. Queer love defies another myth: the heterosexual, nuclear family. Diaz suggests that intimacy can create a sacred, even holy space, 'like church', an 'escape' over which the lovers have dominion. She has written another breathtaking, groundbreaking book, an intellectually rigorous exploration of the postcolonial toll on land, love and people, as well as a call to fight back. In her soaring poems, she deepens and revises the word 'postcolonial', demonstrating not only that love persists in the aftermath of colonialism, but that it provides a means of transcendence, too.
Diaz...crafts a withering critique of conditions faced by Native peoples past and present ... Postcolonial Love Poem is also a prescient ecological jeremiad that links the genocidal impulses of U.S. settler colonialism directly to the visible and immediate emergencies of climate crisis ... And perhaps the most difficult achievement of Postcolonial Love Poem is its continued faith in so many forms and varieties of love ... In poem after poem...Postcolonial Love Poem does this “real work” with devastating lyricism and defiant survivance ... The result is one of elemental metamorphosis and communion.
... authoritative, original and sinuous. It is a fascinating plunge into Diaz’s culture, especially in 'The First Water Is the Body', a long, defiant, breathtaking poem in which she shares the way she sees river and person as one ... Diaz explores possession, makes us think about what it means to be possessed by a country, a lover, a river. Her take on sexual love is bold and complicated, balanced between surrender and resistance ... There is a touch of Sharon Olds about the physical precision of Diaz’s poetry, its bravado and uplift. She is fearless about naked (in every sense) truths and always surprising ... The collection is jewelled throughout with Native American words and stars and semi-precious stones—there is an ongoing phosphorescence to the writing. I learned the names of gems I had never heard of until now— Natalie Diaz is one of them.
Diaz is a master of transfiguration ... Hip imagery in Postcolonial Love Poem has important symbolic meaning in the body and appears frequently in Diaz’s collection threading these poems together in an effective, and thought-provoking way ... Between vivid and often sensuous scenes, Diaz poses vulnerable and surprising questions to the reader ... Diaz is doing the hard work of both decolonization and discovery in these poems, finding new truths and possibly long-lasting healing and change with language that is truly her own ... groundbreaking ... gripping ... Acknowledging our own bodies in place and time and history, finding those we can belong to, those we can love, are essential human longings and for Diaz, also a balm against systemic oppression that could have otherwise deprived her of all poetic urgings. Postcolonial Love Poem teaches as much as it soothes. Diaz interweaves personal and universal love and desire and successfully demonstrates their centrality to our collective story.
... some beautiful erotic poems and joyous celebrations of queer love ... She sometimes displays a tendency, perhaps because of the discursive and expansive nature of her contemplations, to linger on a thought or image for too long (only two poems here are short enough to fit onto one page). Then again, the best poems are among the longest ... The paradox of the book’s title is clear: in America, there is no postcolonial; in these poems, too, histories of land domination and genocide collide with the imperial present, turning touch and desire – even the possibility of writing a love poem – into radical acts of preservation ... at once a poignant answer and a call to attention.
... powerful and timely ... a fierce critique of colonization, both past and present, but it is also a tender and nuanced treatment of the human condition ... more than well-deployed extended metaphor. Diaz infuses every poem with lyricism; even the prose poems have a distinct harmony underlying the words. She asserts her mastery of language early and often. I have never encountered a writer more capable of balancing softness and strength. These poems are quiet and technical and precise, yet the speaker never feels weak or timid. Rather, there is an everpresent sense that the rage lingering just beneath the lines may bare its teeth ... Once again, Diaz reminds us why she is so often placed among the most talented writers of our generation. This is a book you won’t want to miss.
Diaz breaks all the rules with the breaks of her lines ... divided into three sections; each section carries gold worth of stories spelled beautifully with letters telling of generations and history ... After living with these poems, readers will feel the urge to stand and resist with her, with the natives of the land, and to look back and apologize for the pain we have caused to the land where we were born and where we took our first steps ... Diaz speaks of wars fought internally and externally; and of colonization of the self and the land that once belonged to her and the indigenous people, she speaks so beautifully ... Pick up the book and treat yourself to a pilgrimage into the known but hidden, into the unknown but desired. Sit down, coffee in hand, to have a conversation about things we have yet to learn from someone who wants to tell the whole story of colonization.
he range of voices invoked in this text is just one of the many markers of Postcolonial Love Poem’s astonishing accessibility, though it is the author’s command over language that reigns triumphant in drawing the reader in ... Lines...seem to do more than merely invoke myth—in their terror and their glory, they become myth ... The world of Diaz’s poetry so quickly turns into the world of the reader it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to distinguish between one’s own reality and the reality Diaz creates ... Postcolonial Love Poem’s obsessions are numerous...One that arrives early is love, which is felt deeply and physically throughout the collection—not only because it seems present at every turn in the book, but also because Diaz’s language for love, and expressions of love, are so intensely physical ... they are endless in their scope, endlessly generous in the possibility they promise. Magnet or minotaur, hematite or cabochon, these are poems that are finding their way to the same place, love-bound in a hundred glorious ways ... Postcolonial Love Poem’s strongest pieces do the hard work of anatomizing foundational American realities in the face of the untruths that created them ... They’re minotaurs and hundred-handed beings, pieces of Noah’s Ark and constellations passing stars between them. Most importantly, they’re the truth; stories that don’t encourage our destruction, but help us persist in the face of it. That can love in our fear, our desire-ways, our grief.
The representation of violence against Native peoples is a driving engine of the book. Whether it be historical or present violence...saturates these pages ... Diaz revels in one of the greatest marks of her poetic genius: her move from realism to the fantastic made real, bound and anchored by theme, language, metaphor and allusion as the doubled layering creates a construction in which the brother's demons haunt him just as he haunts both the family and the text ... In the very present absence of the Mojave language, Postcolonial Love Poem becomes a very present love poem to self and community, post colonialism.
... captures a sense of desire and centers the ugly legacies of colonialism. Many of the luminous poems express sensuality through visceral imagery, but they also create a new context for love poems—postcolonialism. In other words, Diaz has created a context uniquely her own by centering queer Indigenous / Latinx experiences ... The ability to capture the legacy of colonialism in stark, beautiful poems is a testament to the author’s brilliance.
... offers a series of rich and sensual poems that illustrate how love is not just physical or sexual, but it is also tied to how we interact with the natural world ... Diaz continues to use the long line in her poems, but it seems that all extraneous words are clipped away, so these poems zero in on the emotional weight of light, crystals, water, air, myth, hips, a wolf and basketball, and Diaz elevates them to levels of connections with the human body and the divine ... Lesser poets would be clumsy making these connections, but Diaz makes that celebratory respect clear, much in the way that one might appreciate a lover who holds a partner as if they must be protected and stood beside for all the growth and battles ahead of their union ... The influences and structures that Diaz employs contribute to the weight of each poem’s deft premise.
Building is the operative word—pages filled with dense low building blocks of narrative and meditation, rubbing shoulders with lapidary dancing love lyrics ... Diaz tackles erasure like it’s never been tackled before...forcing us to recognise the connections between brown skin and poverty ... Yet, what should be the saddest collection is an exultant sky hook, dark humour flickering like a whiplash, like the 'Snake-light' allowing Diaz 'to read a text in anything.'
The book’s bedrocks are both the angst and anger of indigenous people in a still colonized landscape as well as the refuge and grounding influence of familial and erotic love. Diaz does not try to reconcile these things. Rather, she examines the way they overlap ... In this collection detailing pathos that includes both eros and violence, working against erasure is essential ... The book is at once both a deeply personal tribute to a lover and cultural critique of a postcolonial world in need of re-spiritualization.
... rapturous ... Diaz turns pleasure into an affirmation of the self, one that exists in direct opposition to a colonizer’s agenda ... It’s satisfying to read of godlike, woman-on-woman sexual prowess, even equating those skills with a biblical seven-day creation myth ... this book...subvert[s] dominant myths with lyric poignancy, into a narrative that exalts what has been worthy of exaltation since the first human looked up at the sky[.]
Diaz’s poems adroitly reflect on her own journey of discovery toward something akin to truth. But she makes no revelatory assumptions about what this truth is. Nothing within her stunning collection is meant to be unveiled—no attempts at profundity. Diaz’s goal, or so it seems, is to accept—not to try and makes sense of it all. She does suggest we are in control of our stories, that what we imagine becomes real ... Ultimately, Natalie Diaz’s collection is a reminder that compassion is a requirement for life. And though Diaz’s journey is uniquely hers, the lessons within Postcolonial Love Poem are widely applicable, if not universal. We are the dirt in ourselves and each other. We are also the water that will wash it all away.
Diaz follows her stellar debut...with another groundbreaking collection. Diaz’s electrifying poems buzz with erotic energy in lines that whisper privately to a lover...but also confront intensely complicated notions of attraction, often framed against this country’s ongoing imperialism ... An unparalleled lyric work, with one of the sexiest lines of poetry ever penned, 'in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake.'
In this exquisite, electrifying collection, Diaz...studies the body through desire and the preservation of Native American lives and cultures, suggesting that to exist as a Native in a world with a history of colonization and genocide is itself a form of protest and celebration ... it’s desire, both in its erotic form and as present in the will to assimilate, that drives the book ... Diaz continues to demonstrate her masterful use of language while reinventing narratives about desire.
