The selection for the 2023 NEA Big Read is Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, originally published in 2020 by Graywolf Press. Postcolonial Love Poem is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. 

​From the Publisher: "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."

Read more about Postcolonial Love Poem at the NEA Big Read's website!

Free copies of Postcolonial Love Poem will be available first come, first serve at public libraries and at Big Read events during early 2023.

You can also find copies of Postcolonial Love Poem, in digital, print, and audiobook on the Public Library catalog here.