Postcolonial Love Poem

Starred review from December 16, 2019
In this exquisite, electrifying collection, Diaz (When My Brother Was an Aztec) studies the body through desire and the preservation of Native American lives and cultures, suggesting that to exist as a Native in a world with a history of colonization and genocide is itself a form of protest and celebration. She explores this idea in “The First Water Is the Body,” cataloguing the destruction of this invaluable resource by those who seek to protect it: “in the U.S., we are tear-gassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling natives trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock.” But it’s desire, both in its erotic form and as present in the will to assimilate, that drives the book: “Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—/ and I am demoned by those desires.” “These Hands, If Not Gods” opens with a stunning lyrical address to a lover: “Haven’t they moved like rivers—/ like glory, like light—/ over the seven days of your body?” The elegiac “Grief Work” closes the book with a meditation on longing: “my melancholy is hoofed./ I, the terrible beautiful// Lampon, a shining devour-horse tethered at the bronze manger of her collarbones.” Diaz continues to demonstrate her masterful use of language while reinventing narratives about desire.

Starred review from March 1, 2020
Diaz follows her stellar debut, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), with another groundbreaking collection. Diaz's electrifying poems buzz with erotic energy in lines that whisper privately to a lover ("Imparadise me.") but also confront intensely complicated notions of attraction, often framed against this country's ongoing imperialism: "an American drone finds then loves / a body." Throughout, Diaz paints vivid landscapes, from the intimate, "middle-night cosmography of your moving hands" to the linguistic cartography of "Manhattan Is a Lenape Word." As in her previous book, the speaker's brother appears, as do other relations from her Mojave community, most notably in a series of prose reflections on the importance of basketball to reservation life: "Only a tribal kid's shot has an arc made of sky." Entire dissertations could be written about Diaz's uses of light and color in this book's lithe lyrics, from the exacting, evocative imagery ("My brothers' bullet is dressed / for a red carpet / in a copper jacket") to the book's many corporal illuminations: "Blood-Light," "Skin-Light," "Snake-Light." An unparalleled lyric work, with one of the sexiest lines of poetry ever penned, "in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)