Postcolonial Love Poem (U.K. edition)
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a 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.
Bio
Natalie Diaz is an associate professor of English in creative writing at Arizona State University, where she holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.
Praise for this book
(An) exquisite, electrifying collection. ... Diaz continues to demonstrate her masterful use of language while reinventingnarratives about desire.
Publishers Weekly starred review
div class="product-review-body">“This is a breakthrough collection. In a world where nothing feels so conservative as a love poem, Diaz takes the form andsmashes it to smithereens, building something all her own. A kind of love poem that can allow history and culture and theanguish of ancestors to flow through and around the poet as she addresses her beloved.”
John Freeman Lit Hub
