In Person: Saretta Morgan at Milkweed Books, with Douglas Kearney

Join us as Milkweed Books welcomes Saretta Morgan for a reading from her new poetry book Alt-Nature, an emergent chorus feeling toward languages of connection in the American Southwest. Saretta will read from Alt-Nature and talk about her book in conversation with poet Douglas Kearney, followed by time for audience questions and a book signing.

Please join us at 6 PM at Milkweed Books, our brick-and-mortar independent bookstore located on the first floor of Open Book, for an unforgettable night of poetry!

About the book

Alt-Nature moves in desert dreams and riverbeds. Here, geography forms the basis of feeling and connection in the American Southwest. These poems open to the desert as a practice of sensuality. Landscapes and Black queer social ecologies illuminate an anti-map of interior poetics and converging horizons. Here, geography forms the basis of feeling. Being and becoming along meridians of environmental degradation, globalized/ing militarism, and incarceration, Saretta Morgan thinks through the languages that instantiate violence alongside those which prepare the body for love.

This book is a love letter to the desert. One that moves with an awareness of how desires for love and belonging underwrite the violence of empire, and how the sensual experience of occupation extends and disrupts geographies and experiences of time and scale.

About the speakers

Saretta Morgan was born in Appalachia and raised on military installations. She’s interested in the ecologies and intimacies that materialize in the shadows of U.S. militarization. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative and organizes with the grassroots humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, and with About Face: Veterans Against the War.

Douglas Kearney is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee and Cave Canem fellow. He’s published eight books and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.