How long does it take to read Postcolonial Love Poem?
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz takes about 1 hour 28 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 1 hour 28 minutes
An evening's read
First published 2020. 80 pages, about 22,000 words.
3 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 2 hours 27 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 1 hour 28 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 55 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
Subjects: Poetry (poetic works by one author), LGBTQ poetry, Stonewall Book Awards, Indians of North America, Poetry, American poetry
