Alt-Nature
Published on 21. March 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
160 pages
978-1-56689-697-9 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
Praise for Alt-NatureA 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
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
"Saretta Morgan presents ambidextrous poems that palpate the edges of many different borders." -Rachel Carroll, Los Angeles Review of Books
"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 context of these meticulous reflections is the wound, the dearth, and the pall that drapes over the United States." -Brenda Iijima, Georgia Review
"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
"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
"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 Gutierrez
"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
"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
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
MN
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 226 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
218 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-56689-697-9 (9781566896979)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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.