The Guardian Reviews Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem

For The Guardian, Emily Pérez looks at Natalie Diaz's second collection, the Forward-nominated Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020). Shifting "nimbly" between languages, Diaz "is at the centre of several 'wars' – squaring off with institutional racism, her brother's drug addiction and environmental destruction," writes Pérez. But "she also devotes much of the collection to eros and 'wag[ing] love.'" More:

Diaz’s first book concluded with a short, aching sequence of poems to a lover. This collection is suffused with poems about romantic, erotic love. Ode to the Beloved’s Hips describes how the lover “licked / smooth the sticky of her hip, / heat-thrummed ossa / coxae”. Others move beyond sex and desire, questioning how romance is marred by the coloniser’s gaze. Her poem Like Church quickly turns into a meditation on whiteness: “Her right hip / bone is a searchlight, sweeping me, finds me. / I’ve only ever escaped through her body. What if / we stopped saying whiteness so it meant anything.”

Diaz probes the catch-22 of American racism: as a person of colour, it is impossible to exist without somehow affirming the proscribed fable written for her by the white majority, even when she is alone with her lover: “They think / brown people fuck better when we are sad. / Like horses. Or coyotes. All hoof or howl”. She is trapped by the mythology: “It’s hard, isn’t it? Not to perform / what they say about our sadness, when we are / always so sad. It is real work to not perform / a fable”.

Read the full review at The Guardian.