Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - Postcolonial Love Poem

This was my first experience reading Diaz, and I was frankly humbled by the political and fleshly intimacy that entwines itself through her lines. Mostly a book which explores love (and refreshingly gender oblique for all its sensuality), Diaz wrestles with the devotion and responsibility to family, to living the occluded citizenship of America, to reconciling the deliberate impoverishment of daily life to the potency of the natural world.

Along the way, Diaz offers us a nearly literal museum tour of Mojave history, a brutal spiritual of her identification with rivers, a mesmerizing submersion into classical allusion.

Do not enter her poetry expecting a fast or wholly polarizing read of indigenous politics or people. Instead her verse blends the metaphorical and the dream, the familiar-remade and the unfamiliar regathered. One leaves her poetry understanding that any explanation of what was read fails its subject, that--like reading Harjo or Eileen Myles--the breathing of the words are itself its weight.

I think too much--
Each morning the Minotauromachy.
Through the night I swing the sickle of my wonders,
a harvest-work--of touch and worry.

...
I am every answer--
a mathematics of anxiety. How any maul can solve
the mesquite tree for the pyre.

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katharina90's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

Many of the poems in this collection either deeply moved me, educated me, or made me laugh out loud.

Favorites include:
-American Arithmetic
-If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert
-Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball
-exhibits from The American Water Museum

"I have a name, yet no one who will say it not roughly.
I am your Native,
and this is my American labyrinth.
Here I am, at your thighs—lilac-lit pools of ablution.
Take my body and make of it—
a Nation, a confession.
Through you even I can be clean."
From: I, Minotaur

"2.
Because a long time ago, Creator gave us a choice: You can write like an Indian god, or you can have a jump shot sweeter than a 44oz. can of government grape juice—one or the other. Everyone but Sherman Alexie chose the jump shot."
From: Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball

"Only water can change water, can heal itself. Not even God
made water. Not on any of the seven days. It was already here.
Or maybe God is water, because I am water, and you are water."
From: exhibits from The American Water Museum

"Art of Fact:
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."
From: exhibits from The American Water Museum

"Police kill Native Americans more
than any other race. Race is a funny word.
Race implies someone will win,
implies, I have as good a chance of winning as—

Who wins the race that isn’t a race?

Native Americans make up 1.9 percent of all police killings, higher per capita than any race—

sometimes race means run."
From: American Arithmetic

"At the National Museum of the American Indian,
68 percent of the collection is from the United States.
I am doing my best to not become a museum
of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.

I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible."
From: American Arithmetic

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mandkips's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

4.25

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lowbrowhighart's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

4.5

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thecolourblue's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

This second collection from Natalie Diaz builds itself around water. Fluid foundations that see it moving from place to place, idea to idea, while keeping a cohesive rhythm.

Diaz explores the concept of the human body as a body of water - merging biological science with Native American mythology to form her own personal and political narrative - as well as the environmental dangers posed to the bodies of water on American land. It's a heady and commanding combination of metaphorical and literal rivers, and, of course, droughts. One of the more overtly political poems on this theme is the excellent 'Exhibits from the American Water Museum', told as a series of informational signs on the walls of a future exhibit about water, drought, Native culture, and colonialism.

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.

True to Diaz' previous work, there are flashes of startling humor, both in the Water Museum poems and in some of the included poems about love and sex. There are a number of sweet and erotic poems exploring the writer's queer identity and seemingly, paying homage to past or present lovers.

Also continuing a thread from Diaz' first collection, When My Brother Was An Aztec (which I loved), are tales of her family, and particularly her brother and his struggles with addiction. These poems are vignetted memories, some frightening, some achingly joyful.

I think I do prefer Diaz' first collection to this one, but this is still a masterful work from a poet fully embodied in her own power and vision.

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krys_kilz's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

I need to sit with and return to this collection. There was so much beneath the surface of each word/line and so many allusions I didn't quite pick up on or comprehend. It's certainly not an easy read, but it was a worthwhile one.

My favorite poems in the collection were: Manhattan Is a Lenape Word, American Arithmetic, They Don't Love You Like I Love You, The First Water Is the Body, exhibits from The American Water Museum, and Isn't the Air Also a Body, Moving?

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gabbygarcia's review against another edition

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challenging reflective slow-paced

4.25

I am touched—I am.
This is my knee, since she touches me there.
This is my throat, as defined by her reaching.

This collection is something really special. It’s not immediately accessible, but once you peel back the layers of each poem (scrolling through the dictionary a few times…), it’s so worth the work. Some favorites of mine include “Manhattan is a Lenape Word”, “American Arithmetic”, “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You”, “The First Body Is The Water”, “exhibits from The American Water Museum”, and “Isn’t the Air Also a Body, Moving?”. Too many favorites! I love the way she writes about water, light, language, and the body. I love how she connects the poems to one another through vocabulary and metaphor. Absolutely excellent and stunning.

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