Consequences upon arrival
A debut work of poetry and a ghost story set in Northern NM
‘ALT-NATURE: POEMS’ By Saretta Morgan Coffey House Press (2024, 135 pp.)
“Now in coming between one desert/And another, I recognize the edges, parting and clear.”
Moving through a wrecked landscape, drought-stricken deserts of the Sonoran and Mojave, where words like “dearth” and “diminished” prevail, the narrator of this exacting collection reflects on the harsh realities of the dominant culture on the border regions. In five sections with the running title “Consequences upon Arrival,” Morgan seizes on language as a way to regain the power dismantled from authority.
“I want language for what the government did to my body,” states the author, a woman poet of color. Language first emerged from this landscape as history, involving soldiers, invasion and vandalism. “History was outlined in our ruin of stitches, re-scaled specifically as though we weren’t there,” she writes. History has determined the geography, the “wellmarbled music of territory,” the official contours of absence and invisibility (perhaps for those originally there and those not seen). The poet notes tantalizingly, “If a sentence passes alwaysthrough landscape and that landscape is not vacant, texture by this sentence forms a discursive core.”
One section, “A horizontal appearance,” was commissioned by the Tucson Museum of Art In 2021 to accompany Iranian artist Nazafarin Lotfi’s work, which the poet describes as a “narrative ecology … Lonely and expressive / with nowhere to go.” In another section, titled “Dominant orientation lights a corridor wide as Mexico’s northern border,” and inspired by photos of African American cavalry in Arizona found in the Library of Congress, the poet seems to address a time of invasion and slavery: “The earliest Negro recorded dead in Arizona was unidentified. … The afterlife of being chatteled. Of being made / a glorified mercenary or buffoon.”
In a final section in prose, the poet presents a kind of journal of her work with (and camping experience within) the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge along the southern Arizona border with Mexico. Not only is this where the masked bobwhite quail was reintroduced, but it is also where cattle ranching once destroyed the habitat, and more recently, dead migrants seeking refuge are found.
Morgan has a razor-sharp sensibility in her approach to grassroots migrant justice and humanitarian aid work, as she describes what she does. Seeing — and calling out with such clarity — are her poetic missions.
‘THE EL CAMINO’: A NOVEL By Car F. Romero
(2023, 396 pp.)
How about a ghost story set in a creepy old hotel with a history of bad blood in a remote town near the Arizona border? In this intriguing debut, Ranchos de Taos native Romero, now living in California, returns to a very familiar old world New Mexican story of Native American martyrs, land-rich and cash-poor Hispano sheepherders, and usurping Eastern transplants with money.
Our narrator, Dan (“Dan the Dreamer”), is a valiant college dropout who takes up wandering across the country as his academic pursuit. He finds jobs as backcountry guides, meets women and feels a sympathy with other vagabonds along the way. A chance offer to be the proprietor for a once-grand, now-desolate hotel near Tierra Amarillo for the summer season seems a good fit, despite the potent windy foreshadowings.
The original owner of El Camino hotel is a Mabel Dodge type who arrived in the early 20th century to try to acquire some land for her growing artistic ventures: Miss Victoria Mariam Vandermueller was the heiress to a rubber fortune in New York, then found Taos and married a Pueblo man; she built her old house on some available land near Santo Mártir, hosting many artists over the years before her fortune ran aground with the crash of ‘29.
Romero adds layer upon layer of mystery and malice. Some of the land had once been a Native American cemetery, the graves then moved. There were grievances about whom old Miss Victoria left the hotel to in her will. And the current corporate owners, Tormac, seem a shadowy front for nefarious deeds, perhaps human trafficking. On top of all this, Dan himself carries some dark energy that needs the attention of a local curandero.
Skin walkers, shadow people, fire and ghosts: Romero’s intriguing debut hosts a grisly mix that will send you screaming out of this hotel.