Natalie Diaz

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, 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 dunefields 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: “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.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

Poems

Postcolonial Love Poem

A fast-paced debut that draws upon reservation folklore, pop culture, fractured gospels, and her brother's addiction to methamphetamine

When My Brother was an Aztec

Christina Sharpe

Dele Adeyemo

Nadia Yala Kisukidi

Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.

In November 2022, the first annual Alchemy Lecture took place at York University in Toronto, bringing four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Now, in these pages, that conversation is captured and expanded in insightful, passionate ways.
    Architect, artist, and urban theorist Dele Adeyemo (UK/Nigeria) calls attention to the complexity of Black infrastructures, questioning how “the environments that surround us condition the possibility of our being.” Poet Natalie Diaz (US/Mojave/Akimel O’otham) writes: “Like story, migration is the sensual movement of knowledge,” and asks, “What is the language we need to live right now?” Philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi (France) suggests there is no diasporic life “without the dynamics of fabulation, where we pass down, from generation to generation, the stories of our ancestors who walked barefoot for many months.” And cultural theorist Rinaldo Walcott (Canada) asks us to consider inheritances beyond white supremacist logics: “What might it mean to live a life, if we can’t risk desiring and working towards utopia?”
    As each Alchemist considers the legacies of anti-colonial struggle, the future of the planet, and the textures of Black and Indigenous life, their essays speak to each other in multiple ways, creating something startling and revelatory: a vision of the world as it is, and as it could be.

The 2022 Alchemy Lecture

Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation

FROM THE WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY When My Brother Was an Aztec is a work of courage and invention - one that foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of Western mythologies and a deeply rooted cultural history. Natalie Diaz's arresting debut explores a brother's addiction and its devastating effects on a household, while offering a political critique of our nations and their pasts. It acknowledges absences and uncomfortable silences, as well as conjuring vivid voices and presences, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus. Stolen cowboy boots, violins on fire; a mariachi band playing in the bathroom, a black bayonet carried between the shoulder blades; the beauty of busted fruit, the sight of hellish visions - Diaz both revels and reveals through her distinctive use of language and imagery, bringing to life every intimate and communal encounter, blooming abundance from scarcity. The result is a wrenching portrayal of sacrifice, want, despair and fortitude that feels truly transformative.

When My Brother Was an Aztec

Elisa Díaz Castelo

Poema de amor poscolonial

Jeb Livingood

Entering its twelfth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country's top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.

50 Poems from Emerging Writers

Best New Poets 2017

Joe Sacco

Eileen Myles

Bao Phi

Naomi Shihab Nye

Ahdaf Soueif

Hisham Matar

Yazan Khalili

George Abraham

Hala Alyan

Najwan Darwish

Sahar Mustafah

Naomi Wallace

Kevin Coval

Marc Lamont Hill

Khaled Mattawa

Jehan Bseiso

Nathalie Handal

Fargo Tbakhi

Ed Bok Lee

Donal O'Kelly

Fady Joudah

Zaina Alsous

Najla Said

Ismail Khalidi

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lina AlSharif

Janan Alexandra

Zeina Azzam

Bryonn Bain

Summer Farah

Mandy Shunnarah

Marking seventy years of displacement and occupation in Palestine, Mizna presents The Palestine Issue, centering the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the rich literature it has spurred, guest edited by playwright and poet Ismail Khalidi. Acclaimed authors engage with seven decades of resilience and creativity in the face of catastrophe, sharing work that combats erasure by remembering, as well as by imagining possible (and impossible) futures.

The Palestine Issue

Mizna

Poema de amor pós-colonial, vencedor do prêmio Pulitzer de poesia em 2021, é o segundo livro de Natalie Diaz, poeta mojave norte-americana. Em sua paisagem lírica, os corpos das mulheres latinas e indígenas são corpos políticos e, ao mesmo tempo, corpos em êxtase. Os versos de Diaz desafiam as condições a partir das quais se escreve num país cuja fundação rasurou e rasura corpos como o dela e das pessoas que ela ama. A seguir, uma pequena apresentação do livro feita por Julie Dorrico, poeta do povo Makuxi e pesquisadora de poesia indígena: "Quando nós, indígenas de Abya Yala (como chamamos politicamente as Américas), pudemos escrever com o alfabeto latino, fomos perscrutados, enquadrados e até ameaçados de trair nossa tradição oral. A escrita, um direito universal apregoado, chegou de modo tardio para nós. Enquanto nosso canto era represado no silêncio, testemunhamos imagens serem construídas e, logo, assumidas como naturais. Assim vimos nossas crenças serem tratadas como mitos. Mas vivemos outros tempos, graças às lutas de nossos antepassados. Agora falamos, pelos livros, sobre experiências ausentes em literaturas nacionais, tais como nossas famílias; amores conjugais, fraternos e territoriais; espiritualidades; e de como fomos, absolutamente todos, atravessados pela experiência colonial-imperial. Poema de amor pós-colonial, de Natalie Diaz, corre com as águas 'Aha Makav, o verdadeiro nome Mojave, e deságua aqui, em nosso pluripaís, em nós, trazendo angústias jamais pronunciadas: o direito ao nosso nome ancestral de povo, em vez de apelidos tratados como legítimos em documentos oficiais; os nossos nomes individuais, antes dados pelo Criador, mas que agora são obrigados a espelhar nomes de colonos que nos subjugaram; os relacionamentos interracial e de gênero a partir de um viés não romântico, contestando a tradição de Estados-nação que inscreveram nosso direito de amar ao desejo inacessível e à morte; o racismo e a violência estrutural que se empenham em nos extinguir. Natalie Diaz traz a esta pele de papel (expressão de Davi Kopenawa para se referir aos 'livros') uma cosmovisão indígena comum aos povos originários quando afirma ser areia, água, cobra. Como cobra, ela diz: 'Quando uma cobra engole sua presa, uma fileira de dentes internos ajuda a passar a mandíbula pelo corpo da presa — passando como lendo. Passando sobre uma palavra com os dentes em nossa mente. Escrever é ser devorada. Ler, estar cheia'. Em seus versos, preciso confessar, sinto- me como devorada." — Julie Dorrico

Poema de Amor Pós Colonial

Revised and updated in 2020 The creator of Twiniversity delivers an essential update to her must-have manual to having twins, now with expanded info on twin pregnancy and tandem breastfeeding, and advice on the best gear to help save your sanity. With almost two times as many sets of twins today as there were forty years ago, What to Do When You're Having Two has quickly become the definitive resource for expectant and new parents of multiples. A mom of fraternal twins and a world-renowned expert on parenting multiples, author Natalie Diaz launched Twiniversity, the world's leading global resource for twin parenting information and support online. Now, with her expanded edition of What to Do, she includes new information on breastfeeding, gear, sleep, and having two when you already have one, as well as: • creating your twin birth plan, • maintaining a realistic sleep schedule, • managing tandem breastfeeding, • stocking up on what you'll need (and knowing what high-tech products are now available and what's a waste of money), and • building a special bond with each of your twins. Accessible, informative, and humorous, What to Do When You're Having Two is the must-have manual for every parent of twins.

The Twins Survival Guide from Pregnancy Through the First Year

What to Do When You're Having Two

These Hands If Not Gods

The Hand Has Twenty-seven Bones --

Sport has always been central to the movements of both the nation-state and the people who resist that nation-state. Think of the Roman Colosseum, Jesse Owens’s four gold-medal victories in the 1936 Nazi Olympics, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s protest at the 1968 Olympics, and the fallout Colin Kaepernick suffered as a result of his recent protest on the sidelines of an NFL game. Sport is a place where the body and the mind are the most dangerous because they are allowed to be unified as one energy. Bodies Built for Game brings together poems, essays, and stories that challenge our traditional ideas of sport and question the power structures that athletics enforce. What is it that drives us to athletics? What is it that makes us break our own bodies or the bodies of others as we root for these unnatural and performed victories? Featuring contributions from a diverse group of writers, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Fatimah Asghar, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Louise Erdrich, Toni Jensen, Ada Limón, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, and Maya Washington, this book challenges America by questioning its games.

The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing

Bodies Built for Game

Hannah Ensor

Bodies Built for Game brings together poems, essays, and stories that challenge our traditional ideas of sport.

Sport has always been central to the movements of both the nation-state and the people who resist that nation-state. Think of the Roman Colosseum, Jesse Owens's four gold-medal victories in the 1936 Nazi Olympics, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's protest at the 1968 Olympics, and the fallout Colin Kaepernick suffered as a result of his recent protest on the sidelines of an NFL game. Sport is a place where the body and the mind are the most dangerous because they are allowed to be unified as one energy. Bodies Built for Game brings together poems, essays, and stories that challenge our traditional ideas of sport and question the power structures that athletics enforce. What is it that drives us to athletics? What is it that makes us break our own bodies or the bodies of others as we root for these unnatural and performed victories? Featuring contributions from a diverse group of writers, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Fatimah Asghar, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Louise Erdrich, Toni Jensen, Ada Limón, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, and Maya Washington, this book challenges America by questioning its games.

Natalie Diaz

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