Reading Natalie Diaz’s Forward prize shortlisted collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, feels like a radical political act. It opens “The war ended / depending on which war you mean: those we started, / before those, millennia ago and onward, / those which started me, which I lost and won – / these ever-blooming wounds.” Wounds reappear throughout Diaz’s book as an image of unhealing trauma, where the public body of history – the genocide of America’s Native population – encounters the private spaces of desire and loss. An intimacy, an erotic interconnectedness, faces this difficult and violent history with love. Since lockdown, Diaz has been in Fort Mohave, Arizona, on the reservation where she grew up. Here the desert meets the Colorado river (at risk from pollution, damming and development, she calls it “the most endangered river in the United States”), not far from Needles, the California border town where she was born in 1978. ‘‘’Aha Makav is the true name of our people, given to us by our Creator who / loosed the river from the earth and built it into our living bodies.” Diaz is talking in this landscape during a time of national mourning and I learn from her book that the Mojave word for “tears” suggests the word “river”. That “a great weeping” might well be translated as “a river of grief”. Diaz’s drawing together of personal and communal grief could not be more timely. And yet the violence she addresses is perpetual – social injustice and racism against non-white bodies is America’s unending war. In the past few weeks, these old wounds have “bloomed” again with the killing of George Floyd; public grieving has gathered into mass protest led by the Black Lives Matter movement. But calling the US “postcolonial” jars; the term suggests nations riven by imperialism whose healing is incomplete. Yet this is Diaz’s point – the myths of equality and freedom peddled by US founding fathers were a white settler fantasy projected on to a wound stretching from sea to shining sea. One of the first things Diaz tells me is that now is an “important and dangerous time for language”. America is struggling again for liberation from structural violences embedded by whiteness and colonial power. Diaz’s trajectory as a poet is tied to the tensions between her three languages: Mojave, Spanish and English. “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.” This theft of language, and the superimposition of the occupier’s tongue, is imprinted on her. Her emotional landscapes probe silences, deconstruct the familiar: “Manhattan is a Lenape word. / Even a watch must be wound. / How can a century or a heart turn / if nobody asks, Where have all / the Natives gone?” She has written elsewhere that Native languages are “the foundation of the American poetic lexicon”. For years, Diaz worked on language revitalisation with the last elder speakers of the Mojave language and she currently teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. Diaz has held prestigious academic fellowships and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant, among other awards. Yet she distrusts institutional power. “What is knowledge for an indigenous person? The things that I know are only considered knowledge if someone outside finds value in it. A large part of my work in the university is to teach my Native students that the things they know and are part of their practice of living – caretaking the land, caretaking their family, the ways we know weather – those things are research. And not just because a white academic studies us and declares there’s value in it.” Equally, she is critical of “mastery” and the fixities of poetic craft. Her own use of traditional forms and allusions – Ashbery, Whitman and Sexton appear, as do Borges, Homer and Lorca – are means of expanding rather than circumscribing her practice. Poetry is a way to hold knowing to account and craft is “an exchange of different knowledge systems”. Sometimes to listen to Diaz speak about aesthetics is to overhear a longing more private than a mere laying out of the poet’s tools. Community and correspondence pervade her work, as does a lyric self that shifts into the bodies of her “beloveds”: a brother, friend, mother or a lover. If love is a radical becoming, desire is a search for what’s possible. “Most of us live in a state of impossibility,” Diaz says, by which I think she means not the inverse of hopefulness but an awareness of the limitations of an individual life. Impossibility as a state of desire, a will towards rebuilding. “In Mojave, our words for want and need are the same – because why would you want what you don’t need? For me, that’s true desire. Desire isn’t frivolous, it’s what life is.” Postcolonial Love Poem is notably different from her debut collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec. She has moved away from a lyrical evocation of a family grappling with a brother’s meth addiction and early death, to a wider interrogation of national mythologies. In a recent poem ‘“Catching Copper”, another image echoing our historical moment appears: “My brothers take a knee, bow / against the asphalt, prostrate / on the concrete for their bullet.” Her poem “American Arithmetic” points out that US police kill more Native Americans per capita than people from any other race, but she insists that “until there is black freedom and liberation that won’t exist for anybody else”. The intersectionality and, again, the interconnectedness of equality and social justice movements, from labour and land rights groups to the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers, to Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter protests is a historical dialogue, a solidarity that capitalism has sought to undo. The centering of black lives is crucial, and the language of liberation is shared, has always been so. Diaz identifies as Mojave, Akimel O’odham and Latinx, as well as queer. Her father was Mexican and her mother is Native, so she understands what it means to grow up across contested borders of racial and religious identity. “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.” Intriguingly, Diaz describes Postcolonial Love Poem as a kind of “bodywork”, a touch that extends from the body into the page but one that also decentres the human body. In this postcolonial state of perpetual war and institutional violence, Diaz’s poetry carves out a space where the nation state can’t intervene. “Can we create these intimate spaces within the very nation that doesn’t want us?” she asks. “Is it possible? Can I really imagine beyond a nation from within a nation?’ Minotaurs appear in her poetic lexicon as figures who are taught from the start that they are animals, born into conditions from which they were never meant to escape. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get out of the labyrinth that is this nation,” she says. “Will any of us?”