Saretta Morgan
“I don’t write anything that moves me away from that feeling of softness. If I can’t say what I need to say in language that preserves the warmth and generosity of spirit I feel when sharing who I am with someone I love, then I don’t say it at all. At least not that day.”
“What is love set against and within austerity? Not the sudden lushness of oasis, but a discipline. 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. As I read and re-read Morgan’s forceful collection, I find looseness and humor in nevertheless taut syntax, unease in certainty, shade in her generosity. This is etho-poetry as much as ecopoetry, an exacting meditation on what it is to cultivate freedom in “emotional fields of decay.” Alt-Nature is utterly gorgeous and, for readers committed to the labor of loving hard despite precarity and scarcity, utterly necessary.”
“Morgan skillfully weaves together landscapes, nuanced reflections on Black and queer identity, and social and ecological commentary in these stirring pages.”
“Saretta Morgan presents ambidextrous poems that palpate the edges of many different borders.”
“In this text, the language of theory takes on the character
of a metaphysics.”
“If I sound a little abstract or obtuse talking about Room for a Counter Interior, it’s only because I don’t think I can really enter its pages with anything other than an aspiration to re-learn.”
Saretta Morgan is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), a Ms. Magazine Best Poetry Book of the year, and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling, 2018), and Room for a Counter Interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). Her work engages the ecologies and forms of connectivity that manifest in the shadows of militarization, incarceration, and U.S. imperialism.
She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson MoCA, Tamaas 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 is a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists recipient.
From 2018-2023 she lived between Mojave and Akimel O'odham lands in the Arizona desert, where she organized with the grassroots humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix.
In an interview with TC Tolbert in ASU’s Poet’s Corner, Tolbert asked at what point in the writing process she considers the reader: “That’s a hard one for me to answer. I'm not sure when. Lately I think about the range of Black women who I love and imagine them all into one room. I ask myself what I have to do to bring everyone into the conversation. It's a kind of proxy to see how many corners of myself I'm speaking from.”
Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, she currently lives on Mvskoke lands in Atlanta, GA. She believes in a Free Palestine as part of the broader inevitability of LAND BACK for Indigenous peoples across the globe.
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(c) Shaunté Glover
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