#PopsugarReadingChallenge Book 9: Postcolonial Love Poem

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book mentioned in another book.
Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is set in a bookstore, and includes several lists of favorite books at the end. This book isn't on the list of Native American poets, but on a separate list simply called "Sublime books." I'm inclined to agree.

Diaz writes about being Indigenous in a country where Native people are being killed in horrifying numbers. She writes about her brothers' addictions, described as an anthropomorphized bullet in "Catching Copper."

My brothers feed their bullet
the way bulls fed Zeus -
burning, on a pyre, their own
thigh bones wrapped in fat.
My brothers take a knee, bow
against the asphalt, prostrate
on the concrete for their bullet.

She tackles real-world spirituality, not the romanticized Hollywood version. If you believe "Water is the first medicine," she says, you need to be on the ground protecting the water supply.

There are grief counselors of site for those who realize
they have entered The American Water Museum not as
patrons but rather as parts of the new exhibit.

Best of all were the love poems. Sexy, passionate, powerful, and very lesbian. From "These Hands, If Not Gods:"

Aren't they, too, the carpenters
of your small church? Have they not burned
on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?

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