Saretta Morgan’s debut full-length collection, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), opens: “I want to wake every morning into love, / where love is the question of how I’m going to help you get free, / where that means whatever it needs to mean.” From these first lines, Morgan introduces love as a sensorial practice, an intent toward embodiment that must be repeated again and again when intimacy and belonging are inescapably enmeshed within the experience of empire.
Alongside the jargon of American militarism, incarceration, and capitalism, Morgan practices the language of collective and enumerated ecologies—of the desert, its occupants, and its occupation—lexicons we often consider distinct, without an ecotone. But the speaker is shaped by these disparate lexicons:
I release a trigger and rounds emerge, pale wounds from the berm.
Even this sound our valley impresses. Even the futures of thorned
perennials bend.
Always underneath it.
I want language for what the government did to
my body.
Offset by the passive voice in the lines that follow, the lyric I becomes a crisp invocation of accountability and recognition (and perhaps a defense) as Morgan overlaps the language of the natural world with the language of military construction. Like the berm, she forms an ecotone receptive to how the valley amplifies and reshapes two distinct sounds: the echo of the gun alongside “the futures of thorned perennials.” If a sound influences the future, I want to believe the same sound influences the past. At the end of this poem, Morgan alludes to blackberry, another thorned perennial, and this knowledge divides the audience (in terms of allusion, in terms of plant identification, after all who can recognize a thorned perennial is also a question of where):
Listen how the officers have paused
for the territory to arrive.
The darker the berry
the longer there is to wait.
We know that in an anti-Black state, the officers are not waiting for a peaceful future, but they are also not who the poem addresses. This is a poem that constellates and suspends. The distance Morgan creates between one body and another changes time in the poem. The line break might bend a future; a poem can announce its own capability: “To foil the context was to outrun the authority’s imagination. And to refuse all explanation of why what we felt was not real.” And yet, this is a collection that demands more than an epistemological solution to systemic colonial violence. Morgan’s work is a sincere act of witness and documentation of her own experiences, including her grassroots migrant justice and humanitarian aid work at the U.S.-Mexico border. The love that she expresses for the desert is necessarily shaped by its role as borderlands and the speaker’s role as a citizen of a colonizing nation.
When Morgan writes in her poem titled “Dominant orientation lights a corridor wide as Mexico’s northern border,” that “Every sentence harbors a unique end,” and that “No two drought are alike,” the variants are natural, human, and social constructions overlapped onto the same geography:
Tubman and Whitney hike Brown Canyon. They spot a rare beardless-
tyrannulet (did she appear from nowhere?) hugging parched northern
boundaries of her species range.A Mexican jaguar treads backwards to observe her melancholic refrain.
It’s without their interest that the
Department of Interior studies
effects of stress and fire on vegetation via high-rise
high-res satellite phenomics.
Like the collection’s title, the poem explores the context of different iterations, of boundaries, of data, of the Black body and other human bodies. When the “Department of Interior studies / effects of stress and fire on vegetation” through the distance of “high-rise / high res satellite phenomics,” when the courts define “The sentence of Natural Life, unlike the sentence of Life,” for whose benefit are these variances constructed?
“It’s without their interest,” Morgan states, “their” reaching toward the wide array of life in Brown Canyon and beyond. Morgan’s language is precise, starting with the human “they” (Tubman and Whitney) and expanding toward other canyon life: the beardless tyrannulet, the Mexican jaguar, all given the personable “she” and gathered into the collective, “their,” an order defined by the lived range of a species. To examine the record of “The earliest Negro recorded dead in Arizona” means also charting “the remains of 425 migrant women [who] were publicly recorded in Pima County,” and means the warning, “don’t take the absence of an image as evidence that the refuge is safe.” In relief to the values input in the official record, Morgan creates an anti-map that confronts the state archive—who it serves and who has access—or as the speaker stipulates, “Let’s say some records / are not good.”
Morgan demands a different kind of integrity from the data set when she creates a document that might resemble one compliant with the state’s request “to report MBQ [masked bobwhite quail] sightings to the refuge with as much contextual information as is available.” Her focus on context requires the acknowledgment that such a record does not serve as refuge or offer good faith. The land in question is “‘wilderness’ until it’s not. You can’t operate a motor vehicle until you can plow the land over to build a wall.” Yet this same “parched desert wilderness in need of white-supremacist protection” is where the speaker has a personal stake:
I say to my dog, Federica: This, lady, is where we practice faith. We believe that the world was different. We believe that it can be different again. Our part in this process is an anxiously evolving question.
I love the return to this specific cross-species, “we,” and how the address can be a humorous and profound attempt to reconcile an outsized human impact on the desert with the stipulation of shared belief, its generous potential, within the landscape and within the anxious self.
Alt-Nature feels out a contextual border, a landscape shaped by conflicting and often undeclared priorities of the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Tohono O’odham Nation, migrants seeking refuge, border patrol removing water, the poet placing water in the desert, the poem removing coordinates to protect the water, the dog whose name is a lineage entering the record. The named enumeration of land use resembles the collection’s earlier treatment of the self:
Or run, a minor expression of remembering performed especially in the
mornings,Running was asking for not this one nor this one,
For flatter abs and a thigh gap, while my fitness was measured in
readiness to drag a human’s weight,The most loved being the body that re-emerges without need,
Slick roots appear en route to the clearing, then hell is characterized by
your temperature upon entering,
While Morgan delays specificity, “for not this one nor this one,” the reader is asked to take up the full, suspended breath of each clause, an exercise where, as the title suggests, we must participate in “A language of subordination that privileges lung capacity.” Whose undeclared priorities are at work in our own bodies? How much do they overlap with the land we occupy?
By charting these priorities, Morgan imagines an ecology beyond toxic American mythologies of the white savior, best interests, and pristine wilderness. Beyond “The governing scale: / The nation-contoured wilderness. From which at the end of the day I drive myself home” are other scales. Under these constraints, whose language do we carry? Whose language do we need to recognize the conditions of others, or as Morgan quotes Mary Pat Brady, what do we imbue with “the shaping, capturing force of scale”? Throughout Alt-Nature, Morgan reminds us scale is also a verb, something that might be done to us; something that we, too, impose on others.
