Postcolonial Love Poem / Natalie Diaz / Graywolf Press / 2020
One of my favorite things about Natalie Diaz’s poetry and celebrity is how much it seems to rub some of the older poets I know wrong. One older Native poet, for example, believes When My Brother Was An Aztec was published too soon. According to them, the manuscript felt too much like an MFA thesis—with its trumpeting play and virtuoso with forms, which to them felt like mere exercises. Another older queer poet went out of their way to comment, “[Diaz] isn’t that great” in a way to suggest not that Diaz isn’t good, just that she’s not as amazing as her celebrity would make it seem.
Maybe these poets are right, but I think the things they would fault about Diaz are the precise reasons why I love her work. I love that When My Brother Was An Aztec stunts on em with ghazals, pantoums, and the like. I love that Postcolonial Love Poem feels overwritten, that it makes me reach for the dictionary time and time again for words as thicc as atman, cabochon, lapidary, alarum, mullion, and transom. Perhaps these are things that would make me side-eye other poets, but in Diaz, there is something so deliberate and authoritative about her voice, her political framing of her own work, that makes me fall for her. While it isn’t the primary or sole reason I love Diaz’s work, I confess, part of the reason I like the high-diction of her work is because it probably makes old white people reach for the dictionary.
If you have yet to fall for Natalie Diaz, try Postcolonial Love Poem. As unabashedly erotic and deftly political as its title would imply, the collection includes intensely sexual poems, flooding over with ecstasy (“Like Church,” “Ink-Light”, and “Ode to the Beloved’s Hips” being my favorite), poems about grief, race, her brother’s drug addiction, basketball, and the environment. These poems are all densely related to the body, which—per the seven-page prose poem “The First Water Is the Body”—extends beyond Western notions of arm, leg, leg, arm, head to also conceive of the land and water as equally, if not more important parts of the body.
My favorite line is from the last poem “Grief Work”: “Achilles chased Hektor around the walls / of Ilium three times--: how long must I circle / the high gate / between her hip and knee / to sold the red-gold geometry / of her thigh?” Ugh.
Poems like “Grief Work,” like “Like Church,” like “Postcolonial Love Poem” are as full of grief as they are with love. I don’t feel like I have anything profound to say about them, just that as a grief-bound queer person of color, I am grateful for these love poems that hold the weight of history as tenderly as they do a lover’s waist. I am grateful that these poems can allude to wars lost and never-ending in the same swooping stanza where “we pleasure to hurt, leave marks / the size of stones—each cabochon polished / by our mouths.” (If you’re slow on the uptake there, she’s talking about leaving hickies.)
Postcolonial Love Poem is a must-read on your syllabus about feminism, ethnic studies, and environmentalism. Or if you’re simply looking for a hot piece of erotica to get you through the quarantine.