Natalie Diaz

The poems in Postcolonial Love Poem that have a definitive speaker are written from the perspective of Diaz herself, or some slightly altered persona version of herself. Diaz is a Native American member of the Mojave, a tribal nation whose ancestral land is located in the American Southwest. She grew up in Needles, California on the Mojave reservation and currently lives in Arizona, teaching at the Arizona State University's Creative Writing MFA program. In many of the poems in the collection, Diaz reflects on her identity as a Native American woman and expresses grief related to the genocide of indigenous people in the United States perpetrated by European settlers and their descendants over centuries of American history. This grief extends to the treatment of Native Americans in the present day, as they continue to be marginalized and victimized by state-sanctioned violence, particularly police violence. Poems like "Manhattan...