We discuss SFPL’s On the Same Page book selection for March/April, Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem.

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Diaz 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. In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of Indigenous, Latinx, Black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.   

Postcolonial Love Poem is the Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award, a Finalist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection, among others.