Poets have based entire works on the resilience of lives in the borderlands: Consider the theories of U.S. Chicana literature developed in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera; the English and Spanish in the verse of Eduardo C. Corral; or the translations, mistranslations, misunderstandings, and righteous objections that drive the new poems of Natalie Scenters-Zapico. U.S. readers—and U.S. poets—could hardly see the U.S. Southwest, or the Mexican northwest, without them.

To those names we can now add Saretta Morgan. The poet grew up in a military family and now lives outside Atlanta, where she leads workshops and assists immigrant aid groups, but her writing here concerns, instead, the southwestern U.S. (and northern Mexican) border zone. Her prose poems, brief singing descriptions, momentary memories and quotations (from natural history, from journals, from radical political writers) in her first book, Alt-Nature, speak insistently and beautifully to lives around the border. Mostly they are the lives of human beings: Mexican, Mexican American, Black, military, veteran, Indigenous, traveling, sedentary. Sometimes, instead, they are plants and animals—the saguaro cactus, the cholla, the endangered “masked bobwhite quail”—who flourish in these disputed spaces. If only, the poems imply, Black and Native and Mexican Americans could thrive in peace there too.

“Between one desert/ and another,” she writes, “I recognize the edges, parting and clear.” The skies may seem clear enough, but the land is not: It’s crossed by enforcers, roads, walls, and detritus, “a story of chassis. And foraged box springs,” like a sprawling bed where no one can sleep. (How can we sleep, the book asks, as other human beings die in the desert? How does anyone sleep?)

The poems speak to present disputes over Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and masked police. A generation or two ago, “the wall was a fence or a joke we used to get home faster,” as Mexican American families crossed the border easily, unworried. Now the same wall can kill.

Completed in 2024, Morgan’s book could not respond to the events of 2025. Instead, she anticipates them, outlining the suffering she has seen—and alleviated, leaving life-saving water for migrants as a member of the field team No More Deaths. She sets those episodes tersely amid other violence, and other recoveries, in the history of southern Arizona, New Mexico, and the U.S. military. “Do I regret my time in the military, my mom wants to know.” The real Morgan, outside the poems, has also worked with Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War.

As its subject crosses geographical borders, the book crosses the borders of genre, of memoir and poem, poem and prose, nature writing and journalism. “The genres are all up for aerial eradication,” like weeds or human victims of satellite eyes: Morgan would prefer that the genres stay, so that she can do her work in between.

She presents her military family, her adult life in southern Arizona as a writer and hiker and protester and immigration activist, through prose that shines and coheres in individual blocks or sentences but does not—on first reading—hold together as stories. Short prose blocks, paragraphs, disconnected sentences, and the occasional verse line invite us to put them together instead, perceiving incidents, characters, attitudes, and worldviews as more of the border zones come into focus through memories, camping trips, natural histories, physical evidence of power, compassion, survival, death, and cruelty. Like this:

None of the signs say thank you for your left arm, or hearing, or lymphatic health, or land,
I want to thank you for being alive,
And thank you, unfortunately, when it isn’t what you want to be,
Thanks down to the lines creasing your deeply infatuated head…

And like this:

The officers watched lengths of our street. Our legs
were barely covered.
Our streets closed and opened to frame the process of intimate regard.

Or like this:

Consequences never not in season. Or at our fingertips. On tap. Unoccupied. Romantically unengaged.
Sleepless against the wet earth. A lush-eyed animal looking forward with ragged breasts.

In these sentences, strung across pages like scraps, human bodies (our own and others’), arroyos, hills, remembered conversations, migrants, and ideas about how to help them all try to work themselves at least half-free.

Alt-Nature is kin to one of the greatest prose-poems built in similar fashion, C. D. Wright’s One Big Self (2007). What Wright did for prisons and Louisiana, Morgan does for the border and the Southwest. Wright looked at outside and inside, at incarceration and at the limits—linguistic and emotional—put on imprisoned people’s lives. Her work spilled over with numbers, and with initials. Morgan instead has “felt for every boundary, adjacent to which neighboring vertebrates fed themselves.”

Each lizard zipping over an arroyo, each cactus flinging a seed on the wind, testifies to the imposed nature of legal and social borders, and to the creation of new kinds of people, words, and laws between them.

Morgan’s border throws up beauty, but also injustice, a “ruin of stitches.” Her short paragraphs and disconnected phrases speak to the lines of verse they refuse to become, to the lines on maps that nature cannot respect, and to the sentences that they form instead—grammatical, legal, or temporal. “Every sentence harbors a unique end.” “What to do with a Negro in the desert,” a person who seems out of place?

What do we make of ourselves, Morgan asks, if we feel that our places have always come in between, subject to objections, stuck between stations? How to “outrun the authority’s imagination,” whose literal or figurative floodlights and fences keep some of us on the run?

Morgan’s prose poems draw not just on what she’s seen and heard but also on radical social critics: Mary Pat Brady on Mexican and Mexican American child labor; Ruth Wilson Gilmore on (to use terms she would use) the abolition of the carceral state; the painter, essayist, and poet Etel Adnan. All three address what Morgan calls that “line that emerges where accountability will not.” Yet the poems never turn predictable in their language. Nor do their pages—written, she says, on “the tissue between floodplains and the officer’s science”—turn into dry or repetitive explanations; Morgan leaves that sort of work for historians, orators, and analysts.

Instead she offers facets, snapshots, parallels: between the quail and the migrant; between her own peripatetic life and others; between Americans, Mexicans, members of Native nations, and figures from legend, among them “the Daughter Coyote,” “the Demeter Coyote,” “the Persephone Coyote.” Many Native nations’ tales cast Coyote as an immortal trickster, playfully ignoring boundaries, or undermining other actors’ efforts, performing sabotage. “Coyote” also means someone paid to take migrants across borders, against the law. Many families (possibly Morgan’s own) straddle the border. In Morgan’s poems, nations’ edges become like the border between life and death, between the fields of childhood and an adulthood in the underworld, that Persephone crosses twice a year, as agreed by her kidnapper and husband, Hades, and her grieving mother, Demeter.

If other migrants, residents, and enforcers look to Morgan like Demeter, Persephone, and Hades, she herself looks a bit like Odysseus, the clever far-traveler beloved by many poets, who wanted nothing more than to find, and to rule, his own home. The book even detours from Tucson, Albuquerque, and Agua Prieta—its usual turf—to Odysseus’s Mediterranean:

Say you’re from Canada, I was told in Cyprus, where they took my passport.
But I didn’t think then, bringing my hand to the mouth of a sailor’s almost-bride,
I embodied the tradition, I was tiptoeing into the gray-cast sea…

Morgan’s borders are zones of fertility, but also scars, as if the continent slashed its own veins: “The geography, devoted, disfigures each wrist.” Enforcing its borders, the United States engages in acts of epic self-harm, as well as consigning migrants to dehydration, kidnapping, and death amid “the barricaded roads” and “the tinted glass of half-drawn windows.”

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Her book amounts not to an argument supported by verified evidence—we should not look to poets for that—but to a tour, a demonstration, a way (like all poems) to show what it’s like to be her: a woman who knows how to cross and to dwell in a beautiful, dry, violent disputed boundary zone that is a symbol for so many other boundary zones—life-death, wet-dry, hopeful-appalled, energized-exhausted, United States-elsewhere. Each term depends on the other. Things grow in between. Some figure out how to live there.