Alt-Nature

Saretta Morgan

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781566896986
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• First
• Dearth-light
• Consequences upon arrival (i)
• A language of subordination that privileges lung capacity holds my head up to its yellowing chest
• The language on fax cover sheets waiting in the hall
• Over a decade later I share with my mom in downtown Santa Fe
• For Francees, because she said, One day maybe you’ll write a poem about us
• Consequences upon arrival (ii)
• If skin passes always through language, texture is compelled by desire
• Consequences upon arrival (iii)
• A horizontal appearance
• Dominant orientation lights a corridor wide as Mexico’s northern border
• Whether the border looks out from eight hundred and fifty eyes, or two, the MBQ remains few though on the rise
• Consequences upon arrival (iv)
• The zen garden is nice on the weekends but the door will lock behind you
• The only time Abou has appeared in an unpleasant dream
• The revolution will not be televised, yet she turns from the horizon and is waving hello
• Consequences upon arrival (v)
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Funder Acknowledgments
• The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press
• About the Author
• Back Cover