Gillian Neimark Reviews Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem

At The Rumpus, Neimark notes that Diaz's latest collection "brings us the body in the form of bodies so rarely sung by, so rarely seen by, our dominant culture—bodies brown-indigenous-Latinx-poor-broken-bullet riddled-drug addicted-queer-ecstatic-light drenched-land merged-pleasured-and-pleasuring. She brings us not only the human body, but that of the desert-river-rock-arroyo-dirt-and-stars, the body of God and the body as God." More: 

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.

The opening poem—from which the title of the collection is taken—begins almost matter-of-factly, in prose rhythms that feel slightly detached and spare: “I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite / can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this / when the war ended.” But soon we careen into a wholly different recounting of stones and their portents:

We pleasure to hurt, leave marks
the size of stones—each a cabochon polished
by our mouths. I, your lapidary, your lapidary wheel
turning—green mottled red—
the jaspers of our desires.

And, a few lines later:
Where your hands have been are diamonds
on my shoulders, down my back, thighs—
I am your culebra.
I am in the dirt for you.

The entire book is saturated with this kind of imagery. 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.

Read on at The Rumpus.