E

Like a game of telephone gone haywire, these mischievous mishearings and homophonic translations remix a classic of 20th Century American poetry.

C’mon, take the E pill (is it estrogen? ecstasy? something else entirely?). E practices mishearing as a bodily reworking of language alongside the poet’s hormonal transition, stretching the upper limits of homophonic translation to unleash the unexpected queer resonances of Louis Zukofsky’s ＂A.＂Ealchemizes mishearing into a political possibility of glitching, noncompliance, and protest. Not a translation, but maximally trans, mishearing transmutes language to generate new possibilities: how hormones change the body; how relationships evolve, multiply, and implode over time.

Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant (trans poet with hearing aids) in search of the hypervivid in her one and only captionless life. She is the author of E, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2025. Find her poems and art writing in Tripwire, Zoeglossia, Tyger Quarterly, Jacket2, Poem of the Day, Sixty Inches From Center, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she is the public programs curator at the Poetry Foundation.