Alt-Nature: 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 was born in Appalachia and raised on military installations. She’s interested in the ecologies and intimacies that materialize in the shadows of U.S. militarization. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative and organizes with the grassroots humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, and with About Face: Veterans Against the War.

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.