Saretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature opens with these lines: “I want to wake every morning into love, / where love is the question of how I’m going to help you get free, / where that means whatever it needs to mean.”
Composed of notational sketches, Alt-Nature is a roving, iridescent book. The tone of the poems fluctuates between an evocative, often elusive mood-filled atmosphere and an aseptic, biting quality that interjects its critique. We are brought into the intimacy of the geography and ecology of the borderland between the United States and Mexico—the Sonoran Desert. The poems move through contested territories, anguishments. Ever-present throughout the book is the fact of structural inequity and racialized violence. The narrator of the book is a queer Black woman who brings into focus the struggle of intersecting liberatory struggles. Present is the strength and connectedness of love.
The context of these meticulous reflections is the wound, the dearth, and the pall that drapes over the United States, a nation-state committed to the Earth’s largest military-industrial-prison complex. This complex is, in effect, a form of nature—that is, an ecology of social relations affecting how bodies, products, and geography organized by this structure interact. Alt-Nature focuses on the ways in which securitization, surveillance, and incarceration are the dominating structural forces of this system, as is love—an energizing valence that is able to nurture in the face of the oppressive objects of power and domination.
The military-industrial-prison complex is naturalized into the fold. It is all-pervasive, embedded in American life to the point that it is often difficult to see or understand in its near totality. One could say it is camouflaged. Often the effects of the system are disassociated from its source. The messaging of a presumed necessity of the system is pumped in through mediated channels as the ideological air we breathe. It becomes an atmosphere. It exerts influence both covertly and out in the open. Morgan uses the word military twice within the book. The word prison appears but once. Yet the effects and consequences of the system are palpably felt in the ways that personhood negotiates lifeways. Rather than a presentation of facts and data, or descriptive artifacts, Morgan offers a scaffolding of affects and somatic conditions—the presentation of “unforeseen and unsystematic relations”1 that challenge the status quo of this system. Morgan writes,
Without softness. Without thesis. It was difficult to understand the
reach of our behavior or to whom we owed the honor.
The military is an organizational unit that responds to threats externally—in theaters of war—as well as internally; the National Guard is called in at times of domestic emergency, such as civil unrest or a natural disaster; however, with the passage of the Insurrection Act, in exceptional cases troops can be brought in to assist general law enforcement. Increasingly, “Main Street” is being outfitted with military-grade equipment. War surplus, such as tanks, combat gear, and assault rifles used to intimidate civilians, was on display during the protests that broke out after the police murder of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.
The security of the nation state is the objective of the military. In 2022, there were approximately 1.4 million active military personnel in the United States. In 2023, 55,000 personnel enlisted in the army, 10,000 short of the number the army hoped to recruit. Base pay for a new enlistee comes out to $20,340 per year. The Department of Defense is the biggest employer in the United States. According to figures from the Pentagon as well as the Military Analysis Network, the United States has approximately 450 to 500 military bases domestically. The United States has 750 bases in 80 countries and colonies around the world. The chat bot of my computer informed me that defense spending accounts for 12 percent of all federal spending and nearly half of discretionary spending. The Department of Defense breaks it down in actual figures—$1.33 trillion in total obligations in 2023. The immensity of this enterprise is staggering. As Morgan writes, “Scale is also a powerful epistemological form, neither neutral nor transparent.” It comes as no surprise that the U.S. military apparatus is the world’s biggest single greenhouse gas emitter. According to reporting by Mother Jones, the military has tried to avoid national emissions reporting and keep greenhouse gas emissions by the military out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, obfuscating its role in climate change. There are many other deleterious ecological consequences of military presence: the effects of war itself as well as ecological sacrifice zones in the form of ammunition dumps, test blast sites referred to as “impact areas,” and military-only sites. This vast organization impacts climatic conditions, as well as impacting desire, connection and love. Alt-Nature reckons with these immense systems as they exert pressure on lifeways:
There were the climates from which we were evacuated.
The climates for which authorities could give two fucks. In which we
could not walk to the store.The dawning climate that was not a horizon but virus steeped in our
bones.The circulatory climates. Where we were perpetually inappropriately
dressed.
Detention centers and prisons are another aspect of this system. The system “secures” its borders and makes sure civic life is “law-abiding” and thus “safe.” I use scare quotes here, because the law is not a neutral tool, it too is subject to discriminatory biases based on race, class, and gender, instrumentalized as such. Securing the system involves punitive conditions. According to a 2023 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, “Together, these systems hold almost 2 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 181 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.” The internal and external aspects of the system are layered, so one is always already within and outside it. The ACLU reports that two out of three of these incarcerated people are also workers. Prison workers perform free or extremely underpaid labor and have virtually no labor protections. In 2020, more than 4,100 corporations profited from mass incarceration in the United States. Well-known corporations use prison labor: Wendy’s, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Sprint, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, American Airlines, Avis, et cetera. Biting into a McDonald’s hamburger, one may not consider that the beef was likely processed by incarcerated individuals. That phone call made to book a flight? Answered by a prison worker. Prison labor is responsible for the production and assembly of most military gear as well. According to the Left Business Observer, “The federal prison industry produces 100 percent of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.” In her 2020 Harvard International Review essay “The Shadow Workforce: Prison Labor and International Trade,” Samar Ahmad writes: “Ironically, prison labor reinvigorates economic nationalism, as companies can brand their products as ‘Made in America’ to appeal to customers and respond to calls to stop outsourcing domestic jobs.”
Detail is required to demonstrate the ubiquity of the reach by this system into daily life. Morgan explains that “Among peoples in the United States Indigenous peoples are incarcerated at the highest rates per capita. Among Blacks the carceral industry (regardless the branching of orchards and centuries of trees) finds its critical mass.” In the poem sequence “Dominant orientation lights a corridor wide as Mexico’s northern border,” she toggles between the meanings of a sentence and sentencing. She writes, “The sentence of Natural Life, unlike the sentence of Life, doesn’t allow for the possibility of parole.”
Highlighted too, in Morgan’s work are the phenomena of disappearances—whether endangered other-than-human animals facing ecological precarity, extinction, or the disappearance of people due to deaths caused by the violence of migration and those resulting from incarceration where incarceration is synonymous with a form of disappearance.2 While reading an article in The Intercept by Greg Grandin, I learned of the adversative passive voice, as in Grandin’s example, “She was disappeared.” The performer of the action is left unstated. This voicing characterizes the intensity and political feeling of Morgan’s poems that exert a “contraindicative pulse”—that to intervene on a situation would be inadvisable, inappropriate, not safe, as in the case where someone or something has been disappeared, is missing, and whose situation has been deemed too unimportant for scrutiny, consideration. The micro-grammatical organization of a sentence holds a mapping of insights and values from the society at large—and/or a rebellion of the terms in which it was produced. Morgan writes,
Refuge is born in the decision to not die. And to not fight either, in that
fatal schema anymore.We arrived at a breathless edge. An unfortunate relationship to the
world.One way to qualify our capacity to feel fulfilled.
Gnarling roots evacuated of verbal expression. Survival void of expression
that was yet impolite.The explanations were acceptable and the desert unstoppably green, still
old feelings raised their eyes from the dirt.
Military modalities of engagement are hardwired into our cultural mores. Basic training is somatic preparedness for combat and a state of war. Military training inculcates behavioral responses to emergent conditions in the environment that have to do with threat management—threats to a nation-state—in the case of the United States, a settler colonial superpower occupying the land of Native Indians. Preparedness assumes eventuality—an imminent condition, the need to be perpetually on alert. As Catherine Lutz has written, the nation’s massive state of war readiness is a psychic condition as much as a physical response mechanism. Borders are delineated and boundary lines are weaponized and surveilled. Surveillance is a form of capture, where every movement becomes a micro-object of geopolitical analysis and control. Every flinching gesture is recorded in databases that store information on “rightful citizens” and persons whose status does not grant them access or the right to remain within the parameters of the nation-state to live or work there. Surveillance technologies are referred to as “intruder detection systems.” According to the 2021 “National Border Security White Paper” authored by Blighter® Surveillance Systems, “the principal challenge for national border security systems is detecting small, low and slow moving targets in complex terrain, and adverse weather conditions.” By the time that most migrants reach the southern border, they are fatigued from traveling great distances for many months over harsh terrain. It is the migrant seeking safety and economic possibility who is being referred to in this description. Yet the nation-state is incapable of eradicating subversive energy, of fully dismissing or dismantling alternative modes of life, of fully rejecting indisputable claims to the land. Borders are porous. Who and what they attempt to hold back enter; who and what they attempt to restrain break the boundary. Borders are ecological, geological, and social. Their artificiality is highlighted by the sheer force required to maintain them. The narrator of Alt-Nature is involved with activist work and solidarity with migrants and refugees who make the trek along the border with Mexico—they come from a diversity of countries, all with different harrowing accounts of the violence they are escaping, the violence they experience during their journey to the United States as well as the violence that they encounter on entering the United States. Morgan worked with No More Deaths, an organization providing humanitarian aid to undocumented migrants in the Sonoran Desert. The textured documentation she elucidates is borne out of the conditions of these crises:
A reservoir to one side, the context arrived with an animal in its mouth.
It further proposed the geography.To foil the context was to outrun the authority’s imagination. And to
refuse all explanations of why what we felt was not real.To disarm the wolf every time at every gate. Unthread its learnedness
and don the lonely pelt.Scale intimacy like a door. The ambient condition clawing along the
rails.
What is the psychic cost of the war machine and the various interrelated corresponding branches of this system? What are the immediate and long-lasting demands that are made of civilians conscripted into participation? How does the military infiltrate and mediate intimate social relationships—between parent and child, family and community, civilian and soldier—colonizing the imaginations of those who can help further its own ends?3 What does it mean for a civilian population to converge with military imperatives? Alt-Nature probes these looming questions with tenderness, in a close-up exploration. Morgan’s offering is resonant; she has had personal experiences with the intricate commitments of this system, its violent legacy, its all-pervasiveness, also the economic sustenance the military provides. Morgan grew up in a military family. Her father had a career in the army as did her mother, until she became pregnant with Saretta and her twin and then left the service. Saretta served four years in the Air Force. In correspondence with Morgan, she shared that numerous members of her family were involved in the military as well. “Both of my grandfathers (or, I should say, all three of my grandfathers, as my maternal grandmother divorced and remarried in her late 20’s) were in the military. My brother wanted to be a Marine but was discharged fairly early. My mother’s eldest brother, and a few of my dad’s brothers and sisters were also in the military. And then lots of cousins over the years. Thankfully less so as time goes on and our family as a whole has more economic and educational avenues open.” In Alt-Nature, she reflects,
Do I regret my time in the military, my mom wants to know.
There’s a lot I regret but nothing rises until I say so.
It rises from a position that stalks and orients its path
through broken things by regret.What I’ve passed behind. Always asking the wrong
question.
Little buds of wild lavender.
Groundbirds blanketed with grasses on the other end. What underlies
the encounter is soft and falls apart.”
There is also—within a simultaneous active present—the reality of Turtle Island, an Indigenous land of many nations very different in outlook and lifeways, existing on the same land that the United States lays claim to. Matriarchally structured, honoring Earth with ideas of life that have to do with an understanding of geography different than trigger-bound reactive tendencies of the military-industrial-prison complex that polices its national borders. Instead the land—territories—are fiercely heterogeneous—ownership is an impossibility—mobility is crucial.4 A recent study led by the Yale School of the Environment found that Indigenous nations across the United States have lost 98.9 percent of their historical land base and that historical land dispossession is associated with current and future climate risk. Here, I do not want to make comparisons that are generalizations. Rather, I want to point to the ways that Morgan’s poem sequences contend with these realities. Traversing, noticing, drifting, grappling with and resisting seeming paramount structural entities, Alt-Nature takes account of Indigenous realities of existence in the face of occupation and empire. Though a violent system of oppression creates devastating conditions, belonging to land has not diminished.
The poem sequence “Consequences upon arrival (i)” is situated within Red Lake Treaty Camp. As Morgan describes in the notes section: “RLTC was one site in a network of camps established by Indigenous water protectors as part of the #Stop Line 3 movement. In fall 2021, drilling for the pipeline had moved on from RLTC’s section of Red Lake River, and the camp was shifting in function to primarily provide a space of ceremony and retreat for water protectors coming from frontline encounters elsewhere.” The poem gives insight into the relations formed with water defenders and herself. The bonding in protest action. The feeling of togetherness, in collective solidarity, the sensations that involvement with this struggle produce. The atmosphere of the land, the feeling of subtle changes in intention and in the ecology. The poignancy of what was involved, for whom, and why. History runs deep, is layered, and is a geological substrate. This awareness of history’s presence as an active material condition is palpable throughout the book, as when Morgan writes that “The explanations were acceptable and the desert unstoppably green, still / old feelings raised their eyes from the dirt.” As Nick Estes writes in Our History Is the Future (2019), “#NoDAPL was [also] a struggle over the meaning of land. For the Oceti Sakowin, history is the land itself: the earth cradles the bones of the ancestors.” In Morgan’s words,
Context was what we waited for.
These conflicts in passing accumulated in the moment for which we
prepared.Though when it arrived we were wet.
We were wide-eyed and well-read. Waiting.
Readiness, we realized, was never the appropriate goal.
Threaded throughout the book is a sensual intimacy that exudes trust and grants it. A constellation of abiding emotions flickers in register as experiences take place. The lyrical charges of Morgan’s verse are maximally responsive to conditions that are social, political, and historical—that bear on emotions. There is a singular beloved, as there are comrades in solidarity with activist struggles, the love and cherishing of land and other-than-human life, the appreciation of the atmospheres produced in spacetime that come together and recede. Writes Morgan,
Miles and seed to flood a cry or unknown color
The bright, horned length of our bodies
Which were not seen through language
But sweat between our breasts
A narrative ecology Lonely and expressive
with nowhere to goHaving digested all the necessary scholarship
Advanced perfect analyses of trauma from inch after inch of receding
splendor
Alt-Nature brings to the fore the implications of state power and the boundaries it draws on the land and people. The bodies of humans and other-than-humans are affected hierarchically and subject to violent imposition. But Morgan also demonstrates that there are forces of resistance that intercept and ameliorate state power and its often deleterious effects: collective activism, solidarity in difference, and a deeply experiential love.
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1. The description by Andrea Gremels, et al., of Édouard Glissant in their introduction to Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South (ed. Gremels, Scheurer, et al., 2022) can also be applied to Morgan’s project. “In this poetic essay (Poetics of Relation), and further in his introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, (Édouard) Glissant (1997–2020) develops a vision of a globalized world determined by transversal movements, transcultural encounters and heterogenous realities that altogether shape a “chaos-world” (chaos-monde) of unforeseen and unsystematic relationalities.”
2. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography, Essays Toward Liberation, London, Verso, 2022. p. 187. “In the twenty-five or so years leading up to Katrina, a massive expansion of prisons and criminalization spread across the United States, driven by different, but connected, processes of displacement, abandonment, and control. As was the case with kidnapped African labor and stolen indigenous land, a completely involuntary migration—this time around, via conviction and incarceration—has once again resulted in the mysterious disappearance of millions of people. This ongoing disappearance is apparently not fully grasped, even in its accomplishment, to judge from the calmness with which most people in the United States of all races receive the news that one out of every 100 of the country’s adults is locked up in a prison or jail.”
3. Bickford, Andrew, et al. Militarization: A Reader (edited by Catherine Besteman and Daniel M. Goldstein, Duke University Press, 2019), 5.
4. See In the Name of the People—anonymously generated text by Liaisons, 2018.
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Alt-Nature. By Saretta Morgan. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2024. 131 pp. $17.95.
