Eva Alter, Poet

Eva Alter is an information scientist, procedural formalist poet, and Jewish-Tidewater-Appalachian American. Her work is published or forthcoming in Hobart, American Poetry Journal, Bruiser Magazine, Appalachian Journal, Reform Jewish Quarterly, Burial Magazine, Michigan City Review of Books, Eulogy Press, and elsewhere. Alter’s debut chapbook AUTOCARTOGRAPHIESwas published by Eulogy Press in October 2025. Poet D.W. Baker’s review of AUTOCARTOGRAPHIES titled “Rhythm and Somatic Consciousness” was published by Dodo Eraser in early 2026.

Alter’s debut full-length collection Sea-oathis forthcoming with Hesse Press, an LA-based press founded in 2014 by poet, artist, and editor Clare Kelly and designer and composer John Wiese.

“Sea-oath is a catalog of internal and generational mythologies, a procedural formalist poetic experiment, and a transcript of an internal trial between the speaker and God.

In Sea-oath, Alter approaches the central theological reckoning of the collection through constructed metrical forms, neologistic indexing, and paratactic syntax in an attempt to articulate and organize memories and histories that had originally been buried by dissociation, self-punishment, and mental and physical escape.

What kind of God permits and witnesses the cyclical transmission of suffering, and how can I understand my life and my path within my inheritance?” - from the description on Asterism Book’s listing of Sea-oath.

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