Alt-Nature

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.

Publication date: February 6, 2024

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 160 pages

ISBN: 9781566896979

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.  

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

Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry

“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

“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. 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

“[A] vigilant, exacting, extraordinarily tender book-length indicator species.”

—Brandon Shimoda

“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.”

—Douglas Kearney

“Saretta has marked ways of imagining a liberating landscape that is yet to come.”

—Youmna Chlala