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. 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.
