Postcolonial Love Poem

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book. It demands that every body carried in its pages - bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers - be touched and held. Where 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 dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now.

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, won an American Book Award. Her second, Postcolonial Love Poem, won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, as well as a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded the Holmes National Poetry Prize and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumna of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.