E

Through Zukofsky’s “A,” Noa Micaela Fields vowelslides careening into E—e for the ebullience of encounter, the ecstasy of estrogen, the eros in error. E’s hypervivid poems embrace rituals of mistake in a trans-temporal game of telephone suffused with crush energy and gossip. Straddling homage and reinvention, these oracular “arse poeticas” divulge shimmering alternate histories through an ear that knows that to mishear is to hear what always already is.

This strikingly innovative and insightfully lyric text of poetic writing, E, is a homophonic translation, a form which translates sound rather than meaning, and is composed by a trans poet with hearing aids. Noa Micaela Fields takes as her text the narratives of “the from—to;” that ongoing re-creation, re-situation of aches and pains, ideas and their figurations into a daily life. This is an altered book indeed on the altar of Change.

Noa Micaela Fields’s poems in E feel into sound-stuff almost protactilely, from the distortion of sounds as filtered through the poet’s hearing aids, to the visual miss-apprehension of language at the interstices of perception. E revives the Renaissance idea of the poem as error and the poet as error-maker, and it’s a delight to wander between shifting meanings, with poems that make you feel as if you could dance between raindrops, both “sapphic” and “faggy,” beholding metapoetic rainbows.