Publisher's Weekly Review
In this exquisite, electrifying collection, Diaz (When My Brother Was an Aztec) studies the body through desire and the preservation of Native American lives and cultures, suggesting that to exist as a Native in a world with a history of colonization and genocide is itself a form of protest and celebration. She explores this idea in "The First Water Is the Body," cataloguing the destruction of this invaluable resource by those who seek to protect it: "in the U.S., we are tear-gassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling natives trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock." But it's desire, both in its erotic form and as present in the will to assimilate, that drives the book: "Like any desert, I learn myself by what's desired of me--/ and I am demoned by those desires." "These Hands, If Not Gods" opens with a stunning lyrical address to a lover: "Haven't they moved like rivers--/ like glory, like light--/ over the seven days of your body?" The elegiac "Grief Work" closes the book with a meditation on longing: "my melancholy is hoofed./ I, the terrible beautiful// Lampon, a shining devour-horse tethered at the bronze manger of her collarbones." Diaz continues to demonstrate her masterful use of language while reinventing narratives about desire. (Mar.)
Booklist Review
Diaz follows her stellar debut, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), with another groundbreaking collection. Diaz's electrifying poems buzz with erotic energy in lines that whisper privately to a lover ("Imparadise me.") but also confront intensely complicated notions of attraction, often framed against this country's ongoing imperialism: "an American drone finds then loves / a body." Throughout, Diaz paints vivid landscapes, from the intimate, "middle-night cosmography of your moving hands" to the linguistic cartography of "Manhattan Is a Lenape Word." As in her previous book, the speaker's brother appears, as do other relations from her Mojave community, most notably in a series of prose reflections on the importance of basketball to reservation life: "Only a tribal kid's shot has an arc made of sky." Entire dissertations could be written about Diaz's uses of light and color in this book's lithe lyrics, from the exacting, evocative imagery ("My brothers' bullet is dressed / for a red carpet / in a copper jacket") to the book's many corporal illuminations: "Blood-Light," "Skin-Light," "Snake-Light." An unparalleled lyric work, with one of the sexiest lines of poetry ever penned, "in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake."
Guardian Review
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She grew up on the banks of the Colorado river and water is her element. Her second collection, nominated for the Forward prize, is authoritative, original and sinuous. It is a fascinating plunge into Diaz's culture, especially in The First Water Is the Body, a long, defiant, breathtaking poem in which she shares the way she sees river and person as one: "The river runs through the middle of my body." Water and its fate are also fused with the treatment of Native American people as "exhibits from The American Water Museum" states plainly: Let me tell you a story about water: Once upon a time there was us. America's thirst tried to drink us away. And here we still are. Humanity is parched, poetry quenches. Diaz explores possession, makes us think about what it means to be possessed by a country, a lover, a river. Her take on sexual love is bold and complicated, balanced between surrender and resistance. In Postcolonial Love Poem, she uses the verb "wage". Where others wage war, she wages love in poems of erotic confrontation in which there is more than a trace of forbidden fruit. Her image of "the cannon flash of your pale skin/settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast" is more opening salvo than caress. And there is no missing the potential for harm: "We touch our bodies like wounds." Other poems are sexily devotional. A lover's hips are comically described as "the body's Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel". There is a touch of Sharon Olds about the physical precision of Diaz's poetry, its bravado and uplift. She is fearless about naked (in every sense) truths and always surprising. If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert is a startling searchlight of a love poem that helps itself to a line from Goldilocks: "Each steaming bowl will be, Just Right". The familiar words seem gorgeously transgressive within their new context. Her first collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec (winner of an American Book award), was about her addict brother. He has survived into this collection, too, variously and alarmingly reappearing with a knife, a gun and, most poignantly (It Was the Animals) a broken piece of picture frame - insisting it is an original piece of Noah's ark. With imaginative sleight of hand and perfect control, Diaz turns this extraordinary poem into an anguished stampede of biblical animals overwhelming her brother's mind and, at one remove, her own. She ends with a heartsore image: My brother - teeming with shadows - a hull of bones, lit by tooth and tusk, lifting his ark high in the air. Another stunning poem about her brother, Cranes, Mafiosos, and a Polaroid Camera, describes him ringing her in the small hours to ask how to fix his broken camera. It includes brilliant, winged cooperation from cranes which seem to belong to another world (she writes from a crane sanctuary in Nebraska). A third, The Mustangs, recalls a happier time, celebrating her brother in the university basketball team (the Mustangs) - a poem of remembered adrenaline, AC/DC's Thunderstruck, pounding horses and hearts. The collection is jewelled throughout with Native American words and stars and semi-precious stones - there is an ongoing phosphorescence to the writing. I learned the names of gems I had never heard of until now - Natalie Diaz is one of them.
