Poems by Saretta Morgan
February 6, 2024 • 6 x 9 • 160 Pages • 978-1-56689-697-9
Alt-Nature moves in desert dreams and riverbeds, an emergent chorus feeling toward languages of connection in the American Southwest.
These poems open to the desert as a practice of sensuality. Landscapes and Black queer social ecologies illuminate an anti-map of interior poetics and converging horizons. Here, geography forms the basis of feeling. Being and becoming along meridians of environmental degradation, globalized/ing militarism, and incarceration, Saretta Morgan thinks through the languages that instantiate violence alongside those which prepare the body for love.
About the Author
Saretta Morgan is the author of Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Press) and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). Her work engages ecologies and forms of connectivity that develop alongside processes of U.S. militarization. Over the past decade she has participated in veteran-led organizing with Veterans for Peace NYC and About Face: Veterans Against the War, as well as the humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix, which provides direct support to address the death and suffering of migrants in the Sonoran Desert. Additionally, she has been fortunate to participate in, and learn from, Indigenous-led water protection and food sovereignty work, Black-led community healing initiatives, and trans-led support for detained migrants. She believes in a Free Palestine as part of the broader inevitability of LAND BACK for Indigenous peoples across the earth. Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, she currently lives on Mvskoke lands in Atlanta, GA where she trains in capoeira and wild bird rehabilitation.
Author's Note
This book was written between 2018-2023, while I lived between the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts for 5 and a half years learning an intimacy with the desert through grassroots migrant justice and humanitarian aid work in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Simultaneously, I was repairing internally from my own history with the U.S. military and carceral systems.
This book is a love letter to the desert. One that moves with an awareness of how desires for love and belonging underwrite the violence of empire, and how the sensual experience of occupation extends and disrupts geographies and experiences of time and scale.
Praise for Alt-Nature
A 2025 Southwest Book of the Year
Winner of the 2024 Southwest Book Award
Finalist for the 2025 Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Ms. Magazine, "Best Poetry of '23-'24"
Public Books, "Public Picks 2024"
“Saretta Morgan presents ambidextrous poems that palpate the edges of many different borders.” —Rachel Carroll, Los Angeles Review of Books
“In Alt-Nature, Morgan deviates from mainstream representations of nature in a masterful re-tooling of vision and perception.” —Debbra Palmer, New York Journal of Books
""Morgan skillfully weaves together landscapes, nuanced reflections on Black and queer identity, and social and ecological commentary in these stirring pages." —Publishers Weekly
"This is a haunting debut, a powerful reminder of how art can, and should, resist systems of oppression.” —The Poetry Question
"The scale of intimacy Morgan lays forth in the pages of Alt-Nature broach timelines of militarism, genocide, and all that nature has archived in resistance to imperialism." —Public Books
“The context of these meticulous reflections is the wound, the dearth, and the pall that drapes over the United States.” —Brenda Iijima, Georgia Review
“Both expansive and compact, Alt-Nature is ultimately outstanding. The dynamic poetry promises a refreshing swim through deep waters.” —Vivienne N. Germain, The Harvard Crimson
“Drawing from social ecologies and landscapes, Morgan’s work helps us each make sense of our place in the world.”
—Serena Zets
"
Alt-Nature feels like a search party for the haunted, the story of a collective body, a nomenclature of ache for belonging. In an homage to the humanitarian aid worker and the border crosser who often does not make their intended arrival, Morgan moves the reader with her acuity for the precise image steeped in the blooming succulence and necropolitical dynamics that dictate the deserts of Central and Southern Arizona."
—Raquel Gutiérrez
“What is perspective without a horizon? What grave, no matter how old, is not fresh? What is the most precise language for what the government does to our bodies? Do wounds, do stitches, become part of the body? In the land, of the land? Is love waking up? Breaking earth? How much afterlife can a body bear? These are questions I find myself asking, or being asked, while reading Saretta Morgan’s vigilant, exacting, extraordinarily tender book-length indicator species, Alt-Nature.” —Brandon Shimoda
“What is love set against and within austerity? Not the sudden lushness of oasis, but a discipline. Saretta Morgan’s keen-whetted Alt-Nature traces intimacies through severe stations—the military, border deserts, the Anthropocene—and finds/maps there the alterity of Black thought and life, which is to say, disciplines sharpened in harsh space-time. As I read and re-read Morgan’s forceful collection, I find looseness and humor in nevertheless taut syntax, unease in certainty, shade in her generosity. This is etho-poetry as much as ecopoetry, an exacting meditation on what it is to cultivate freedom in “emotional fields of decay.” Alt-Nature is utterly gorgeous and, for readers committed to the labor of loving hard despite precarity and scarcity, utterly necessary.” —Douglas Kearney
“In Alt-Nature, we are dropped into tender valleys of intimacy. We move through the violence of relations between self and collective. We navigate the implications of maintaining order and hierarchies through our choices. We emerge wondering if we were happy, if it was joy. After a while, we realize that through these topologies, Saretta has marked ways of imagining a liberating landscape that is yet to come.” —Youmna Chlala
