Read and discuss a book of poems with others who appreciate poetry and like to take a closer look at form, structure, and craft. Discussions will be lively and interactive, and participants will have a chance to share thoughts and ask questions. Come prepared to read your favorite poems, lines, and passages from the book aloud.

November's selection is Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz. Erin Rodoni will lead the discussion.

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that everybody 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 on 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 dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Erin Rodoni’s most recent book, And if the Woods Carry You, won the 2020 Southern Indiana Review Michael Waters Poetry Prize and was nominated for the Northern California Book Award. Her two previous collections are: Body, in Good Light and A Landscape for Loss. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies such as Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, and Best New Poets. She has won awards from AWP, Ninth Letter, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She teaches and mentors through the Writing Salon and serves on the Board of the Marin Poetry Center.