Relating Otherwise: Erotic Power, Indigenous Relationality, and More-Than-Human Entanglements in Natalia Diaz’s “The First Water is the Body”

Abstract

This essay analyzes human and more-than-human entanglements in Natalie Diaz’s poem “The First Water is the Body,” seeing the poem as a space where such relations proliferate, and drawing attention to the poet’s explicit refusal to label them as metaphorical. It provides a close reading of erotic embodi-ment in Diaz’s poem through the combined lenses of Indigenous relationality, ecocriticism, and new materialism, using Audre Lorde’s ideas of erotic power as well as Lorena Cabal’s articulation of the “body-land territory” to argue that Diaz’s poetics presents body and river as a territory in itself.