Eva Alter is a poet, theorist, and cataloging librarian who has developed what she calls “post-confessional ontoformalism,” an approach to poetry that uses formal constraints to document and interrogate the self through or via the collapse of confessional transparency. She retains the urgency, intimacy, and psychic stakes of confessional poetry while filtering them through formally inventive, often self-constructed systems that mediate, encode, and resurrect the subject’s history and self-mythology by employing “catalog grammar” and “catalog logic.”

“Catalog grammar” is poetic syntax modeled on metadata and cataloging systems via use of classification, relational indexing, and the organization of meaning through controlled vocabularies, enumeration, and modular phrasing, and “catalog logic” is the conceptual framework that governs how knowledge, memory, and identity are systematized within a poem by emphasizing schematic relationships over narrative cohesion.

Her debut chapbook, Autocartographies (Eulogy Press, 2025), blends archival language, found poetry, and recursive blank verse to chart a fractured ontology across five movements: Orientation, Pattern Recognition, Mythogenesis, Embodiment, and Protocols. Her subsequent work, Malat cache, applies this methodology to stage a formal theological trial using Hebrew legal terminology and 6/7/6 syllabic tercets as mathematic containment technology for approaching overwhelming material.

In addition to library and information science, Eva’s work applies Jewish legal frameworks, Biblical Hebrew syntax and parataxis, and mathematical formal constraints to create poetry that functions simultaneously as forensic documentation, theological investigation, and epistemic survival system.

Alter’s academic background includes extensive study of Jewish history, Holocaust studies, Biblical studies, Biblical Hebrew, and library and information science, demonstrating how professional analytical frameworks can be adapted for personal healing and theological accountability.