Natalie Diaz

"Maybe a wound is a way of seeing into someone. Or maybe it is an opening into the person who inflicted the wound. I don’t need the wounds to disappear, but I want to give them the possibility to flowe…"

"I am Native, so I am both—truth/fiction—and also bleeding over or overflowing each. Truth is always a placeholder for something. For how we feel, or how we want to feel, how we wished we didn’t feel. …"

"In Mojave, our words for want and need are the same – because why would you want what you don’t need?"

"Poetry was an unlikely place for me to land … I mean, who says: ‘I’m going to be a poet when I grow up’? I grew up on a reservation and we had a boarding school where language was taken."

"I had to be willing to risk myself for what I wanted. And I want desire; I want to be capable of it. I want to be deserving of it."