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.