Amanda
There are books that don't just enter the bloodstream—they become it. Not text but tide: a push and pull, dense with undertow. Postcolonial Love Poem is one of those. Natalie Diaz writes in a tongue heavy with sediment and blood, syllables formed by muscle and scraped from memory. The rhythms here are heartbeat, floodplain, oxygen, and drift. Water-strong and water-strange, these poems sweep readers into depths beyond the limits of language.
I read with breath caught beneath my ribs, snagged in the space between reach and retreat. What mutters in the marrow? What had I lost before I could give it a name? Not absence as an idea but absence as an anatomical fact: the hollow where a tooth was pulled, the socket still raw. Diaz's landscapes aren't metaphor—they're anatomy. Sacred cartographies stitched into tendons, breath drawn from basins and ranges, each word a stone burnished by mouths that would not forget.
Diaz writes the body the way a flash flood writes a canyon—with sudden force, patient aftermath, and sediment settling into curves. It's erosion made evident and passion worn down to a shine. Her poems render desire not as ornament but architecture. Desire constructs its own scaffolding. Touch refuses erasure. Each line spills past its margins, ignoring the usual fences. Her syntax sprawls like an arroyo after a storm—necessary, alive. Every poem carries tension at its seam: beauty snagged on brutality, taking braided with being taken, grace howling under resistance like wind through canyon walls.
Reading, I felt myself on the bank of a river I've never seen, yet somehow recognise—something stirring under the skin, salt in the throat, mud between toes. The distance here isn't only geographical. It's blood-deep—generations of forgetting can taste like copper pennies, can sound like static where stories should be. Still, recognition rang in my chest like the particular thrum a struck bell makes underwater. Diaz's water doesn't cleanse—it presses in and leaves behind sediment and salt. It's water that remembers the shape of every mouth that tried to swallow it.
What stunned me most was how Diaz treats contradiction like a live wire—only she doesn't insulate it, doesn't ground it; she just lets it spark across the page. Love is both a wound and a weapon. The colonised body contains both divinity and desecration. It's the specific friction between being witnessed and being spared, between being held and being handled. In "American Arithmetic", flesh transforms into fraction, protest, and ghost—sometimes all at once. "The First Water Is the Body" isn't a metaphor—it's an assertion, an equation, and an invocation. Every sentence costs something. Every line demands breath, blood, presence.
I reached the book's end feeling both hollowed out and heavier. Something passed close in the current—close enough to feel, too far to catch. These poems didn't offer inheritance, but they offered rhythm—footfall, heartbeat, the click of prayer beads between fingers. Perhaps I don't remember the river. But maybe the river remembers something no one taught me the shape of, and maybe that's enough. Or maybe it isn't. Diaz doesn't offer closure—only space. She lets longing settle like silt, unresolved and unashamed.
Her work isn't merely poetry. It's a pressure system. It is akin to a body of water, possessing its own unique gravitational pull. It transforms from grit to grief and then back to grace. It's a map marked by salt. I'll return to it—not for clarity but for contact. To press again against what I cannot name. To listen for that thin, familiar note—the one that travels through bedrock, through silence, through marrow.
Originally posted at www.marvelish.me.
There are books that don't just enter the bloodstream—they become it. Not text but tide: a push and pull, dense with undertow. Postcolonial Love Poem is one of those. Natalie Diaz writes in a tongue heavy with sediment and blood, syllables formed by muscle and scraped from memory. The rhythms here are heartbeat, floodplain, oxygen, and drift. Water-strong and water-strange, these poems sweep readers into depths beyond the limits of language.
I read with breath caught beneath my ribs, snagged in the space between reach and retreat. What mutters in the marrow? What had I lost before I could give it a name? Not absence as an idea but absence as an anatomical fact: the hollow where a tooth was pulled, the socket still raw. Diaz's landscapes aren't metaphor—they're anatomy. Sacred cartographies stitched into tendons, breath drawn from basins and ranges, each word a stone burnished by mouths that would not forget.
Diaz writes the body the way a flash flood writes a canyon—with sudden force, patient aftermath, and sediment settling into curves. It's erosion made evident and passion worn down to a shine. Her poems render desire not as ornament but architecture. Desire constructs its own scaffolding. Touch refuses erasure. Each line spills past its margins, ignoring the usual fences. Her syntax sprawls like an arroyo after a storm—necessary, alive. Every poem carries tension at its seam: beauty snagged on brutality, taking braided with being taken, grace howling under resistance like wind through canyon walls.
Reading, I felt myself on the bank of a river I've never seen, yet somehow recognise—something stirring under the skin, salt in the throat, mud between toes. The distance here isn't only geographical. It's blood-deep—generations of forgetting can taste like copper pennies, can sound like static where stories should be. Still, recognition rang in my chest like the particular thrum a struck bell makes underwater. Diaz's water doesn't cleanse—it presses in and leaves behind sediment and salt. It's water that remembers the shape of every mouth that tried to swallow it.
What stunned me most was how Diaz treats contradiction like a live wire—only she doesn't insulate it, doesn't ground it; she just lets it spark across the page. Love is both a wound and a weapon. The colonised body contains both divinity and desecration. It's the specific friction between being witnessed and being spared, between being held and being handled. In "American Arithmetic", flesh transforms into fraction, protest, and ghost—sometimes all at once. "The First Water Is the Body" isn't a metaphor—it's an assertion, an equation, and an invocation. Every sentence costs something. Every line demands breath, blood, presence.
I reached the book's end feeling both hollowed out and heavier. Something passed close in the current—close enough to feel, too far to catch. These poems didn't offer inheritance, but they offered rhythm—footfall, heartbeat, the click of prayer beads between fingers. Perhaps I don't remember the river. But maybe the river remembers something no one taught me the shape of, and maybe that's enough. Or maybe it isn't. Diaz doesn't offer closure—only space. She lets longing settle like silt, unresolved and unashamed.
Her work isn't merely poetry. It's a pressure system. It is akin to a body of water, possessing its own unique gravitational pull. It transforms from grit to grief and then back to grace. It's a map marked by salt. I'll return to it—not for clarity but for contact. To press again against what I cannot name. To listen for that thin, familiar note—the one that travels through bedrock, through silence, through marrow.
Originally posted at www.marvelish.me.
There are books that don’t just enter the bloodstream—they become it. Not text, but tide: a push and pull, dense with undertow. Postcolonial Love Poem is one of those. Natalie Diaz writes in a tongue heavy with sediment and blood, syllables formed by muscle and scraped from memory. The rhythms here are heartbeat, floodplain, oxygen, and drift. These poems don’t stand still at the water’s edge, waiting. River-strong and river-strange, they lurch forward, sweeping the reader into depths beyond the limits of language.
I read with breath snagged somewhere beneath the ribs, caught in the pause between reach and retreat, haunted by distance—the kind that arrives before you're born. The kind you feel in the marrow. What was lost before I knew to look for it—what still mutters in the bone? I wasn’t reading to know. I was reading to find out what knowing might feel like. And in Diaz’s hands, it is not soft. It cuts. It glows. It governs. Her landscapes aren’t metaphor—they're anatomy. Sacred cartographies stitched into tendons, breath caught from basins and ranges, each word a stone burnished by mouths that would not forget.
Diaz writes the body the way flood writes canyon—force, patience, time, and pressure into curve. It's absence made visible, passion worn down to a shine. Her poems render desire not as ornament but architecture. Defiance in the shape of want. A kind of touch that refuses to be erased. Each line spills past its margins, ignoring the usual fences. Her syntax sprawls like a river shedding its channel—defiant, necessary, alive. Every poem carries tension at its seam: beauty snagged on brutality, taking braided with being taken, resistance humming under grace like a wire under water.
Reading, I felt myself on the bank of a river I’ve never seen, yet somehow recognise it—something stirring under the skin, a current curling around the ankles of memory. I don’t have any claim to this language, or this land, or this lineage, but still, the ache was real. It rang true in my chest, like the sound that an absence makes when it passes where it used to dwell. Her water doesn’t cleanse here—it doesn’t try. It presses in and leaves salt and sediment. It's a water that remembers the shape of every mouth that tried to silence it.
What most stunned me was how Diaz can turn contradiction into a cradle. She keep it steady without smoothing it down. Over and over, love is both a wound and a weapon. Again and again, the colonised body house both divinity and desecration. It's an unresolvable friction that exists between the experiences of being seen and feeling safe, between being witnessed and being spared. In "American Arithmetic," the concept of flesh transforms into fraction, protest, and ghost—sometimes all at once. “The First Water Is the Body” is not a metaphor—it’s an assertion, an equation, and an invocation. There's no way to coast through this book, where every sentence costs something. Every line demands our breath, our blood, and our presence.
I reached the end of the book feeling both hollowed out and heavier. Something passed close in the current—close enough to feel, too far to catch. These poems didn’t give me inheritance, but they offered a a rhythm. Perhaps I don’t remember the river. But maybe—just maybe— the river remembers me, and maybe that’s enough. Or maybe it isn’t. Diaz doesn’t offer closure—only space. She lets the ache put down roots, unresolved and unashamed, and the longing is allowed to linger.
This isn’t merely poetry. It’s a pressure system. A body of water with its own gravity. Grit, grief, grace—all flowing from one mouth. The map is marked by salt. I’ll return to it—not for clarity. For contact. To brush up again against the thing I can’t name. To listen, maybe, for that thin, familiar note I've been straining toward all along.
There are books that don’t just enter the bloodstream—they become it. Not text, but tide: a push and pull, dense with undertow. Postcolonial Love Poem is one of those. Natalie Diaz writes in a tongue heavy with sediment and blood, syllables formed by muscle and scraped from memory. The rhythms here are heartbeat, floodplain, oxygen, and drift. These poems don’t stand still at the water’s edge, waiting. River-strong and river-strange, they lurch forward, sweeping the reader into depths beyond the limits of language.
I read with breath snagged somewhere beneath the ribs, caught in the pause between reach and retreat, haunted by distance—the kind that arrives before you're born. The kind you feel in the marrow. What was lost before I knew to look for it—what still mutters in the bone? I wasn’t reading to know. I was reading to find out what knowing might feel like. And in Diaz’s hands, it is not soft. It cuts. It glows. It governs. Her landscapes aren’t metaphor—they're anatomy. Sacred cartographies stitched into tendons, breath caught from basins and ranges, each word a stone burnished by mouths that would not forget.
Diaz writes the body the way flood writes canyon—force, patience, time, and pressure into curve. It's absence made visible, passion worn down to a shine. Her poems render desire not as ornament but architecture. Defiance in the shape of want. A kind of touch that refuses to be erased. Each line spills past its margins, ignoring the usual fences. Her syntax sprawls like a river shedding its channel—defiant, necessary, alive. Every poem carries tension at its seam: beauty snagged on brutality, taking braided with being taken, resistance humming under grace like a wire under water.
Reading, I felt myself on the bank of a river I’ve never seen, yet somehow recognise it—something stirring under the skin, a current curling around the ankles of memory. I don’t have any claim to this language, or this land, or this lineage, but still, the ache was real. It rang true in my chest, like the sound that an absence makes when it passes where it used to dwell. Her water doesn’t cleanse here—it doesn’t try. It presses in and leaves salt and sediment. It's a water that remembers the shape of every mouth that tried to silence it.
What most stunned me was how Diaz can turn contradiction into a cradle. She keep it steady without smoothing it down. Over and over, love is both a wound and a weapon. Again and again, the colonised body house both divinity and desecration. It's an unresolvable friction that exists between the experiences of being seen and feeling safe, between being witnessed and being spared. In "American Arithmetic," the concept of flesh transforms into fraction, protest, and ghost—sometimes all at once. “The First Water Is the Body” is not a metaphor—it’s an assertion, an equation, and an invocation. There's no way to coast through this book, where every sentence costs something. Every line demands our breath, our blood, and our presence.
I reached the end of the book feeling both hollowed out and heavier. Something passed close in the current—close enough to feel, too far to catch. These poems didn’t give me inheritance, but they offered a a rhythm. Perhaps I don’t remember the river. But maybe—just maybe— the river remembers me, and maybe that’s enough. Or maybe it isn’t. Diaz doesn’t offer closure—only space. She lets the ache put down roots, unresolved and unashamed, and the longing is allowed to linger.
This isn’t merely poetry. It’s a pressure system. A body of water with its own gravity. Grit, grief, grace—all flowing from one mouth. The map is marked by salt. I’ll return to it—not for clarity. For contact. To brush up again against the thing I can’t name. To listen, maybe, for that thin, familiar note I've been straining toward all along.
Living alone in her late mother’s house in Zwolle, Isabel is a quiet and fiercely guarded woman. An uncle bequeathed the house to the family with the understanding that whenever Isabel’s brother Louis married, he would inherit it. Isabel resides there now under a type of suspended claim—that of a caretaker, but not owner. Louis disturbs her meticulous isolation when he asks her to host Eva, his lover, for the summer while he is away. Isabel grudgingly agrees. Eva arrives there with a laid-back sense of belonging that perturbs Isabel from the beginning.
There is not an instantaneous connection here. There is instead conflict—social, emotional, territorial. Gradually, their relationship evolves. Their tense cohabitation gains an edge of intimacy, one that stays murky as the story progresses. What starts out as apprehension gradually becomes fascination, then something even more charged and more devastating. Their dynamic is never entirely mutual, never safe, and never free of the past.
Van der Wouden writes tension with elegant precision—sexual, definitely, but also psychological and historical. The past exerts a real pressure here, acting as more than just a backdrop. The book takes place in a nation that is still writing its postwar history, conveniently forgetting collaboration but remembering gallantry. The Safekeep questions what people choose to live with in the aftermath.
With a consistent smouldering tone, the language is restrained and lyrical. Van der Wouden does not over-explain. Isabel keeps her cards close to her chest, and some readers may find her emotional opacity difficult at first: she’s not particularly likeable, but she feels real and understandable. This book calls on its readers to sit with discomfort and observe what isn’t said aloud. This narrative is one about silence as a means of survival—and complicity.
Though Isabel and Eva reject any neat categories, their relationship is crucial. Their closeness is spun with unresolved anguish, cold secrets, and a distinct disparity in power. It is not a conventional romance, but it does explore the intersection of fear and desire. Van der Wouden lets ambiguity handle the heavy work; nothing is simple and nobody is innocent.
Late in the book, there is a revelation of the sort that I treasure. It corrodes, rather than explodes. It clarifies the characters and their decisions, thereby enhancing the enormity of what the book has been developing all along. Van der Wouden seems far more fascinated with consequences than in drama for its own sake.
Readers sensitive to issues of complicity, betrayal, or the silent violences we sometimes inherit—emotional, familial, or historical—may want to proceed carefully. This book explores how long the plainly visible can remain unseen, as well as how often comfort can be preserved only at someone else’s expense.
The Safekeep‘s lack of tidy resolution is one of its most remarkable aspects. It asks a lot: tolerance of uncertainty, patience, and attention. It honours those things with a narrative that sticks with you. It’s about memory, power, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves to cope with what we can’t face.
This will probably appeal if you want something slow, suspenseful, psychologically personal, and morally complicated. If you want lovable characters or closure, this may not be the best option. The Safekeep offers fiction that dares to challenge.
Originally written for The Lesbrary: https://lesbrary.com/the-safekeep-by-yael-van-der-wouden-review/
Living alone in her late mother’s house in Zwolle, Isabel is a quiet and fiercely guarded woman. An uncle bequeathed the house to the family with the understanding that whenever Isabel’s brother Louis married, he would inherit it. Isabel resides there now under a type of suspended claim—that of a caretaker, but not owner. Louis disturbs her meticulous isolation when he asks her to host Eva, his lover, for the summer while he is away. Isabel grudgingly agrees. Eva arrives there with a laid-back sense of belonging that perturbs Isabel from the beginning.
There is not an instantaneous connection here. There is instead conflict—social, emotional, territorial. Gradually, their relationship evolves. Their tense cohabitation gains an edge of intimacy, one that stays murky as the story progresses. What starts out as apprehension gradually becomes fascination, then something even more charged and more devastating. Their dynamic is never entirely mutual, never safe, and never free of the past.
Van der Wouden writes tension with elegant precision—sexual, definitely, but also psychological and historical. The past exerts a real pressure here, acting as more than just a backdrop. The book takes place in a nation that is still writing its postwar history, conveniently forgetting collaboration but remembering gallantry. The Safekeep questions what people choose to live with in the aftermath.
With a consistent smouldering tone, the language is restrained and lyrical. Van der Wouden does not over-explain. Isabel keeps her cards close to her chest, and some readers may find her emotional opacity difficult at first: she’s not particularly likeable, but she feels real and understandable. This book calls on its readers to sit with discomfort and observe what isn’t said aloud. This narrative is one about silence as a means of survival—and complicity.
Though Isabel and Eva reject any neat categories, their relationship is crucial. Their closeness is spun with unresolved anguish, cold secrets, and a distinct disparity in power. It is not a conventional romance, but it does explore the intersection of fear and desire. Van der Wouden lets ambiguity handle the heavy work; nothing is simple and nobody is innocent.
Late in the book, there is a revelation of the sort that I treasure. It corrodes, rather than explodes. It clarifies the characters and their decisions, thereby enhancing the enormity of what the book has been developing all along. Van der Wouden seems far more fascinated with consequences than in drama for its own sake.
Readers sensitive to issues of complicity, betrayal, or the silent violences we sometimes inherit—emotional, familial, or historical—may want to proceed carefully. This book explores how long the plainly visible can remain unseen, as well as how often comfort can be preserved only at someone else’s expense.
The Safekeep‘s lack of tidy resolution is one of its most remarkable aspects. It asks a lot: tolerance of uncertainty, patience, and attention. It honours those things with a narrative that sticks with you. It’s about memory, power, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves to cope with what we can’t face.
This will probably appeal if you want something slow, suspenseful, psychologically personal, and morally complicated. If you want lovable characters or closure, this may not be the best option. The Safekeep offers fiction that dares to challenge.
Originally written for The Lesbrary: https://lesbrary.com/the-safekeep-by-yael-van-der-wouden-review/
