THERE IS A ROCK THAT SITS on the oceanbed of Eva Alter’s Sea-oath. It alters all the deep currents circulating around her poems, wearing at their time-smoothed edges. The rock in question is either made of guilt or shame or memory, probably some composite of all three, and it has the kind of black-hole gravity to it that flattens whatever enters its event horizon. In this abyssal pocket, such elemental concepts as time and place get pressed onto the same ever-shifting plane, and all for a good reason. It’s no surprise that a childhood injury can sit beside an ancestral crossing in this book; the psychiatric ward beside Genesis; a dead relative beside an animal pulled back from death. Nothing down there stays for long. Sea-oath is the record of what finally comes up for air.

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This reverse-gravity is also evident in the way Alter has organized her collection. Sea-oath, published by Hesse Press, one of the more relevant independent publishers out there today, is divided into seven sections, each named like another chapter of a private theology: Necropolis, Shoresh (Hebrew for “root”), Genesis, Eschatology, Theodicy, Prophecy, and Schema. The life inside them, in return, is sorted according to a deeper, more hermetic classification, the way scripture compartmentalizes existence into creation, catastrophe, morals, the problem of good and evil, revelation, what comes after, what have you. This taxonomic logic governs nearly every formal decision in the book. I find it meaningful, if not fitting, that Alter’s poems resemble amorphous deep-sea creatures: they expand, contract, taper, or sprawl toward whatever pressure their context demands of them. Sometimes, they come in dense blocks; some become narrow, skeletal things; some borrow or cannibalize preexisting texts. Shenandoah Crux takes the shape of a golden shovel, the poetic form in which the final word of each line reconstructs a line from another poet, in this case Mary Helen Callier. Recursion and Panorama are erasures cut from Robert Alter’s translations of Job and Genesis. Dilemma: A Cento is stitched from lines by nine poets credited at the end: Plath, Glück, Seuss, Cruz, Bidart, Harjo, among others. These borrowed forms resonate, and at times enact, one of the collection’s central quests: survival as a means of taking an inherited language apart and finding out what, if anything, can still be used to understand what’s going on today.

^{Sea-oath, by Eva Alter (Hesse Press, 2026)
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Across nearly fifty poems, that conversion shows up more and more clearly at sentence-level, where Alter has built herself an idiolect out of two vocabularies that at first sight may have no business marrying. Titles like Cryptophasia (the clinical term for the language twins invent between themselves), Synclinal Ridge (a geological fold), Conscience Template, and Autocartographies sit a few pages from such seemingly theological ones as Sin-eater, Neshama, Yimakh shemo, and Galut ha’dibbur. The medical and the geological run headlong into the folkloric and the liturgical, and neither register ever wins. This matters mainly because each vocabulary has, and is defined by, its own obvious limits. Medicine may accurately classify an injury all right, but might equally fail to consecrate the meaning one might seek to survive. Similarly, scripture may supply the spiritual meaning while threatening to desecrate the material truth about the wound. Alter keeps both languages in circulation and forces each to contaminate the other (“this is who I’ve always been / a skeleton of a soul”). Her psyche becomes a landscape along the way. The body of her memories acquires fault lines and strata, and they crack in the very silence between the poems.

Sea-oath is a survivor’s book, without a doubt. It’s a collection of childhood sexual abuse, of hypnotic self-harms and near-suicides, of treatment centers out in the Sonoran desert. Alter refuses to narrate any of these in a straight line, and that fragmentation becomes essential to the book’s central friction, that trauma doesn’t really organize around any discernible beginnings or ends, at least not in a traditional sense. Instead, the same handful of images keep coming at the reader in the same way we would deal with them in real life (as flashbacks, as daydreams, as intrusive thoughts). Each iteration returns altered, inspected from varying, at times contradictory, angles: a leviathan she must either swallow or be swallowed by; buried earth she claws back out of; teeth that are sometimes hers and sometimes an animal’s she’s borrowed to survive being herself. Along the way, the personal damage accummulates and keeps getting juxtaposed over larger, inter-generational one. The Atlantic may serve as both a salvation for a great-great-grandfather while becoming the very thing that pulls her under. Ancestors flee shtetls for steamships a generation before that. Different forms of devastation echo one another without cancelling out each other’s differences. It makes sense that the path to healing in Alter’s book is conditional, provisional, too bodily to be compromised by a sense of closure. Despite the manifold cruelties of its source material, Sea-oath breaks all of these tenets and reassembles them to discover mellower depths, deep in the trenches of Alter’s conflicting psyche. It is an understandably personal, if not deliberately demanding, way to follow a book for sure, but it is also the only honest way to build a cosmology this large. That’s also probably why nothing stays buried in this world for good but nearly everything resurfaces appears changed:

And he was here         when I arose    evolved

into a vital    ghost—       Galvanized to

          fulfill     the joy and burden of a life—

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Sea-oath is available for purchase through Hesse Press.





Eva Alter is an information scientist, procedural formalist poet, and Jewish-Tidewater-Appalachian American. Her poetry has been published in Hobart, American Poetry Journal, Bruiser Magazine, Appalachian Journal, Reform Jewish Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the author of AUTOCARTOGRAPHIES (Eulogy Press, 2025) and Sea-oath (Hesse Press, 2026).

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