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Hey.
Yesterday, Saretta gave a workshop on reading.
And much of it was thinking about what it means
to have a body which reads.
So I thought I would begin with two notes I wrote in my journal
as I read Alt-Nature, Saretta Morgan's debut poetry
collection.
The notes mark moments of intrusion, conversation
with a militarized world and the natural world,
so fitting while reading Alt-Nature.
One, reading Saretta's book in the backyard.
"A huge slow Air Force jet,
A carrier comes overhead loud and close,
and I watch its belly.
Cannot read a word as it passes.
The normal of our living under it, house shaking,
car alarms set off.
I wonder at the others who will see its underbelly, who
see its underbellies, who see underbellies like it right now.
Two.
An insect just pooped a tiny mustard-colored feces
onto page 14 of Saretta's book.
In my attempt to remove it, I smear it
into a triangular shape that looks like a moth,
or a bird diving towards the Earth."
I met Saretta through visitation we
are both doing at the Eloy Immigrant Detention Center.
Saretta's community work also includes Phoenix No More Deaths
and About Face: Veterans against War.
The political work and its context
infuse Saretta's writing.
But I don't want to reduce Alt-Nature
to its political context, or maybe I
don't want to reduce political context to political issues.
In Alt-Nature, border militarization,
mass incarceration, racialized capitalism,
are all a part of the fabric and the landscapes the words
traverse.
And the wounds that these systems inflict
are present and visible on the land
and on the bodies who inhabit and move across the land.
But nothing is separable, it is the fullness
of the fabric which she confronts,
and not the individual issues on their own.
Alt-Nature enters landscapes and listens, touches, inhabits.
In an act of love, it offers words to the landscapes,
even as it understands that language itself obstructs
our abilities to see and articulate
what is happening in the field to which we are given.
In Alt-Nature, Saretta Morgan listens
with a wild attention; past, below,
and beyond what is made legible by languages of subordination.
Her attention is careful.
Holding the wounds, the stitches,
she writes, I rest my head on the frame of a burning question.
Inside of Alt-Nature, we encounter a deeply animate
world.
A world which can pus, which can bleed and wound precisely
because it is alive and struggling to stay that way.
From this presence, Saretta dares a polyvocal 'we.'
She attends to and extends the possibility
of collectivity inside of the fragmentation
and violence of our world.
It is a most generous of possibilities,
and I am deeply grateful for this book.
Saretta Morgan has received support from the Jerome
Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts,
Tucson MOCA, Thomas Cross-Cultural Organization,
Virginia G Piper Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere.
She has been an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts,
the Center for African-American Poetry and Poetics,
and Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
She has published the chapbooks Room for a Counter Interior
(Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) and Feeling Upon Arrival
(Ugly Duckling).
Alt-Nature, out from Coffee House Press,
is her first full length collection.
It is an honor to introduce Saretta Morgan.
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