E. Noa Micaela Fields. Nightboat Books, 2026. 89 Pages.

“I begin my reply with trills ≈ ≈
how art starts with haunting.”

Allow me to begin this review with a confession: I couldn’t find the trill symbol on my computer to insert here, woeful thing, that. Or did I intend (or hear myself intending) whoa-ful thing? Because Fields stops us in our tracks, and masterfully, offering that gentle gesture of what it means to be unsure. In a world of so much “certainty” and such easy and cheap opining, taking pause (or taking paws, like the crazy love of a puppy’s insistent presence) is part of E’s welcome remedy.

I did, instead of a trill, find the “approximately equal” sign, that notation of uneven possibilities. In our present world of fractured listening, it’s the stopping to do that very thing which holds a holy (and wholly) important possibility, as we take time to ask “What did I hear?”—that poetic dance partner to “What did I say?”— while staying in conversation with all the stuff that sings in between those two.

That’s what Noa Micaela Fields makes real in E, her unbook, inviting us into the space between question and answer. But E is only an “un” book in the way that an unwrapped package or an untied shoe release their wiggly magic, haunting us into an art of listening anew—that is, if we’re willing to pay attention (and intention). Fields starts conversations in places and in ways that offer a fresh foray into the world of hearing (and here-ing). There’s no escape, however, from E’s guileless demands. Once you’ve listened this intently (and this intensely), there’s no other way to proceed. The concert has commenced, as it were, and there’s no way out, except by going further in. Prepare to hear who you are, as well as who you could be, seated in E’s erudite auditorium.

My next confession: I knew it was a musician who wrote this before I knew it was a musician who wrote this. Listen to the music of these lines from “Echolalia:”

         I’m
pssst tense

subjunctive
unfolding
spine, needling

form’s tomb-
narrow sonata.

Tomb-narrow sonata, indeed. But what sonata isn’t? The time-honored, classical sonata-allegro form of exposition, development, and recapitulation gets turned on its head in E. Our author, like a fine chef, folds the “subjunctive / unfolding / spine”—that most electric of life-giving structures—back into itself, helping it become both that which binds a book together as well as being the energetic pathway of a human body. And really, what’s the difference? E is us being allowed, and invited, to explore Fields’ own burgeoning electricities, all while holding her spine as we hold, and as we open, the spine of this book. Openness becomes the thing inestimable, in both the body of our transitioning author and in the homonym of her last name. Reading her is reaping what the fecundity of any field (and in this case, not just one field, but many) can offer. The essence of E is whispered in this poem particularly by that universal plosive (and conversationally explosive) missive that’s got nothing to do with the past, “pssst tense” neither dead nor tension inducing, but aching with the raucousness of the real.

In “Ears are an erogenous zone,” the sounds (or “the zounds,” God’s wounds, after all, and an invite to honor our own) permeate (and permutate) four lines so thrillingly, it’s hard to hear (and heart: hear!) anything other than the beat of Fields’ own heart, thrumming her words into an intimate entropy that can only explode while eating itself:

Deafen us gods! Define us through the mystic
ouroboros help us survive autotuned overtones
deus ex machinations
         unreliably ourselves

Overtones hail from the fundamental, the “source,” as it were, of sound, and are the natural response to both the music of the spheres (find, if you can, Augustine’s De Musica for an ancient and apt lesson) as well as to any other musicks out there, which can include car tires squealing, babies crying, or Wagnerian sopranos in lament. Fields proposes, poem after poem, that each of us is both an overtone and a fundamental; each of us is sounding and responding to the music all around us, and perhaps most importantly, to that which sings within.  If E is an overtone of Louis Zukofsky’s A (and it is, Fields having picked up “a battered copy of…Zukofksy’s ‘poem of life,’” a tome that became an “alterbook” for Fields and helped give birth to E), E is, in musical terms, the fundamental to that overtone called B (“Be”). Thus, E is as much a book about hearing what is essential, and how that essence resonates in everything and in everyone, as it is a guide for here-ing, helping us learn to “Be here now,” in the words of the late Ram Dass. Thus does E’s fundamental “help us survive” the modern fuckery of  “autotuned overtones,” those “deus ex machinations” that can make us “unreliably ourselves.”

That kind of music-making is magisterial, and often freaks out those of us who prefer to see themselves as the fundamental, be it a president or a pastor or anyone touting their particularities as bigger or better than others. Fields’ un-book is an unthawing, a celebration of its own understandings of just that, as we read in “Eulogy for past selves:”

Isomorphic tongue
made addressable by
undressing, blessing.

Art un
seeingly
hears us
          at peace.

If ever there was an epoch (and ours is indeed epic) needful of being at peace, we stand in one now. E, with artfully economic savvy—one in which the only transactions required are those of paying attention to that redemptive question, “Is this what I’m hearing you say?”—offers a way forward, albeit one of formidably radical inclusion. “Art un / seeingly / hears us / at peace” may in fact be E’s holon, that phenomenon simultaneously whole in and of itself, while still being part of a larger whole. It is also the veritable thesis of this book. This fractal of Fields’ art graciously names the eye (the “I”), that most violently judgmental organ of the body, as something not to be avoided (exclusion is not the way of the future, nor is it the way forward) but transformed.  

In E, we are taught, by no less than Art itself, to “un  see” and by doing so, to be heard, of all things, “at peace.”