Poem-a-Day, the daily series by the Academy of American Poets which spotlights new work by contemporary poets, featured Natalie Diaz (CRF 2015) today. Diaz read excerpts from a poem entitled “Duned.” About this poem Diaz says: “…[it is] a meditation in my desert—a practice of the images I am made from or in. Home-home. Out here I wonder the chasms between experiencing my desert in this fleshed, personed body and writing in the English language body which ‘means’ to deny my desert and me a life beyond scarcity, beyond thorn or what needs to be plucked out. My abundant and living desert, often called wasted land or badland, the way we, my brothers, sisters, and cousins, have often been referred to as. This is where I learned my life and what I love, and what I am still learning how to love and love better. I spent the first year of the current pandemic in this desert, bearing the closure of one world alongside the openings and returnings of/to other worlds—loss and death, heat and love, stars and dreams, which are always exponential here. It’s a new poem, and lucky to share with you all, unpinned and unfinished.” Click here to read and listen to the poem.
Natalie Diaz Poem-a-Day
