A review by anishinaabekwereads
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz

challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

 “I am fluent in water. Water is fluent in my body -- 

it spoke my body into existence.

If a river spoke English, it might say:

What begins in water

will end without it

Or,

I remember you ---

I cannot forget

my own body.”

Excerpt from “exhibits from The American Water Museum,” by Natalie Diaz in Postcolonial Love Poem

When people tell you Diaz is A Voice, listen to them. I had heard great things about When My Brother Was an Aztec, but I never got around to reading it. Isn’t that always the case? Well I picked up a copy of Postcolonial Love Poem in July and continued to bide my time, putting off what I feared would be a ground-shaking experience. It was. Truly.

Diaz crafts such incredible poetry I don’t know how to encapsulate my thoughts into a tidy caption review. This is the kind of collection you tab up, you highlight, you speak quietly to yourself over and over again, craving the flow of words. Her words are shattering, glowing, tight-fisted and soft-lipped. Her ability to craft yearning in the reader, an insatiable hunger for more, is power. What’s more, there were so many parts of this collection where I felt myself. For me, so much of poetry is about feeling things fiercely. Poetry that elicits such visceral feelings is truly love, is the poet’s heart and soul held out vulnerable as they ask the reader, too, to be vulnerable between the lines of their words. Postcolonial Love Poem does that for me on a deep level. I keep flipping back to “I, Minotaur,” to “exhibits from The American Water Museum,” “From the Desire Field,” “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You,” and, well, honestly the whole thing.