Postcolonial Love Poem
by Natalie Diaz
Summary
Postcolonial Love Poem writes love poems in which Indigenous survival, queer desire, and the politics of water cannot be separated from one another, treating intimacy itself as inseparable from the history of colonization the book's title names directly. Natalie Diaz's imagery is sensual and elemental, drawing on Mojave language, biblical cadence, and the specific physical vocabulary of basketball alike to insist that the body, her own body and her lover's, is a contested and sacred ground rather than a neutral setting for desire. Diaz treats basketball with the same seriousness she brings to language and water, drawing on her own years playing the sport professionally to give the body's physical vocabulary genuine, lived authority within the poems.
The collection reframes intimacy as a genuine act of resistance against colonial erasure, refusing to treat love poetry and political poetry as separate genres that happen to share a book. Water recurs throughout as both a literal resource under threat, tied to the ongoing struggle over water rights on Indigenous land, and a figure for desire itself, so that a poem about wanting another person and a poem about a river's survival can occupy the same lines without strain.
Reading Postcolonial Love Poem means encountering desire written with total physical specificity, never abstracted into a safer, more general language of romance. It suits a reader who wants love poetry that keeps faith with a larger political and historical reality rather than setting that reality aside, someone drawn to a voice equally at home in tenderness and in open defiance.
Historical Context & Significance
Postcolonial Love Poem won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; that year's finalists were Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's A Treatise on Stars and Carolyn Forché's In the Lateness of the World. The book had already been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, an unusually wide run of recognition across both American and British prize circuits.
Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village on the California, Arizona, and Nevada border and is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community. Before turning to poetry full time she played point guard for Old Dominion University, reaching the NCAA Final Four as a freshman, then played professional basketball abroad before completing an MFA at Old Dominion. Her debut collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, had already won an American Book Award, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018, three years before this Pulitzer.