Saretta Morgan, Alt-Nature

 

Low-basin flora. Verdant.
            Inching vertebral ache.

A warm anatomy to feel threatened:
                                    endangered by;
                                    thick-muscled and in danger of. Iridescent over.

            And in the tissue between floodplains and the officer’s science.
And the quiet between and want for shade, the hooded eyes and fluid
body. 

Gentle body for whom I lie down. (“First”)

I’d been eager to see further from Brooklyn poet Saretta Morgan for some time, after discovering her work through her chapbook room for a counter interior (Brooklyn NY: portable press @ yo-yo labs, 2017) [see my review of such here], finally able to get my hands on her debut full-length collection, Alt-Nature (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2024). Through eighteen extended lyrics, Morgan offers an ongoing declaration, almost a sequence, articulating an unfolding between pages, between poems, presented as a lyric of inquiry. There is such a wonderful, underlying sense of music that moves through her lines. “We had very good reason to believe that the authorities were lying.” the opening poem, “First,” begins. “Were / not omnipresent. Which meant the authorities would at some moment / arrive.” Further on in the collection, offering: “In this foreign city the population is small. Very few spend money on / beads & pigeon feathers. // She takes care of a man. It is the same job her mother does.”

Through Alt-Nature, Morgan offers poems that bleed into each other, with blurred yet delineated boundaries; a suite of clusters, if you will. She writes of natural elements and of human nature, articulating elements of landscape and ecology and the extensions and limitations of human choice, human reaction. There is such attention to detail through these lyrics, such a delicate and devoted kindness. Alt-Nature is a book one could almost dip in and out of, writing family and human interaction, borders and boundaries, and how we relate, and interrelate. As she writes: “Holes, like decades. Advancing with acute, unannounced release // the lip of geographic faults.” As announced by the title, there’s an ecological thread that runs through this collection, this book-length poem suite, one that echoes concurrent conversations by poets including Orchid Tierney, or Tasnuva Hayden [see my review of her latest here]; a thread held just under the surface of certain poems, akin to tendrils, interconnecting sections of her ongoing lyric. Hers is an astute, ecological lyric, a series of notations on travel, writing out the nuance into a declared horizon. The opening section of “For Francees, because she said, One day maybe you’ll write a poem about us,” for example, reads: “For a long time she could make a living weaving dream catchers from / paper heads and wild bird feathers in her birthplace, Agua Prieta. // She could call from detention to remind me of my anniversary. Of / my wife’s birthday, weeks before the fact. I’d say, Whose birthday is it / coming? But she was never wrong. // In that life she said, I must be patient with my daughter. // Offered anything she would say. I want my mom.” Or, further in the collection, as she writes:

The dominant orientation is based in devotion. The geography, devoted,
disfigures each wrist. 

            Veins negotiate a well-marbled music of territory.

Militant roots open to the half-drawn beauty of corridors. Where the
governing image branches with light.