Postcolonial Love Poem

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE
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.

Natalie Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation w