WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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Hey.

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Yesterday, Saretta gave
a workshop on reading.

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And much of it was thinking
about what it means

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to have a body which reads.

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So I thought I would begin with
two notes I wrote in my journal

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as I read Alt-Nature,
Saretta Morgan's debut poetry

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collection.

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The notes mark moments of
intrusion, conversation

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with a militarized world
and the natural world,

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so fitting while
reading Alt-Nature.

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One, reading Saretta's
book in the backyard.

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"A huge slow Air Force jet,

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A carrier comes
overhead loud and close,

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and I watch its belly.

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Cannot read a word as it passes.

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The normal of our living
under it, house shaking,

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car alarms set off.

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I wonder at the others who
will see its underbelly, who

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see its underbellies, who see
underbellies like it right now.

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Two.

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An insect just pooped a
tiny mustard-colored feces

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onto page 14 of Saretta's book.

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In my attempt to
remove it, I smear it

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into a triangular shape
that looks like a moth,

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or a bird diving
towards the Earth."

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I met Saretta
through visitation we

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are both doing at the Eloy
Immigrant Detention Center.

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Saretta's community work also
includes Phoenix No More Deaths

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and About Face:
Veterans against War.

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The political work
and its context

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infuse Saretta's writing.

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But I don't want to
reduce Alt-Nature

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to its political
context, or maybe I

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don't want to reduce political
context to political issues.

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In Alt-Nature, border
militarization,

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mass incarceration,
racialized capitalism,

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are all a part of the fabric
and the landscapes the words

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traverse.

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And the wounds that
these systems inflict

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are present and
visible on the land

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and on the bodies who inhabit
and move across the land.

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But nothing is separable,
it is the fullness

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of the fabric which
she confronts,

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and not the individual
issues on their own.

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Alt-Nature enters landscapes
and listens, touches, inhabits.

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In an act of love, it offers
words to the landscapes,

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even as it understands that
language itself obstructs

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our abilities to
see and articulate

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what is happening in the
field to which we are given.

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In Alt-Nature,
Saretta Morgan listens

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with a wild attention;
past, below,

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and beyond what is made legible
by languages of subordination.

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Her attention is careful.

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Holding the wounds,
the stitches,

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she writes, I rest my head on
the frame of a burning question.

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Inside of Alt-Nature, we
encounter a deeply animate

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world.

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A world which can pus, which
can bleed and wound precisely

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because it is alive and
struggling to stay that way.

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From this presence, Saretta
dares a polyvocal 'we.'

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She attends to and
extends the possibility

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of collectivity inside
of the fragmentation

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and violence of our world.

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It is a most generous
of possibilities,

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and I am deeply
grateful for this book.

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Saretta Morgan has received
support from the Jerome

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Foundation, Arizona
Commission on the Arts,

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Tucson MOCA, Thomas
Cross-Cultural Organization,

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Virginia G Piper Center for
Creative Writing, and elsewhere.

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She has been an artist in
residence at the Lower Manhattan

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Cultural Council, Headlands
Center for the Arts,

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the Center for African-American
Poetry and Poetics,

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and Oak Spring
Garden Foundation.

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She has published the chapbooks
Room for a Counter Interior

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(Portable Press at Yo-Yo
Labs) and Feeling Upon Arrival

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(Ugly Duckling).

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Alt-Nature, out from
Coffee House Press,

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is her first full
length collection.

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It is an honor to
introduce Saretta Morgan.

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[APPLAUSE]

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