Katie Naughton. The Real Ethereal. Buffalo: Fort Collins: Delete Press, 2024. 90 pages.

 


        Over Instagram Lucy Ives shares an exercise that helps her writing students reevaluate the nature and scale of an event. She prompts: Return to a moment when you paused yesterday (to make a cup of coffee, because your car got stuck on an icy hill, as someone took a long time to finish their sentence) and describe what you thought as you waited for the next moment to come. Can you recreate the sensation of the event taking form, particularly if the event wasn’t in doubt (i.e., the water was going to boil)?

What do we gain access to within small moments of determined action—what sort of agency (or lack thereof) emerges in waiting? Ives’s prompt purposefully addresses the quotidian—those unexceptional happenings of our moment-to-moment lives, but today amid the monumental changes that are underway (the gutting of the federal agencies, the increase of aggressive ICE raids, the rapid consolidation of power in a billionaire oligarchy), and the global continuities that are masquerading as changes (a genocide in Gaza that is not over despite a declared ceasefire, a pandemic still tremoring even as we address it in the past tense, climate change climate change climate change), I find myself asking similar questions about what constitutes an event and how I should position myself in time. I am both aware of the scale of the crises unfolding and waiting for those crises to land with their consequences in my present life and my felt landscape. Most of the violences unfolding remain in my future. I only know things are going to get worse before they get better.

Katie Naughton’s book, The Real Ethereal, was written and published before Trump’s second term, but nevertheless it subtly captures today’s sense of limited agency in the face of what’s coming. I continue to answer emails, do the dishes, watch the sun rise and set. Time passes unexceptionally despite what feels like an exceptional moment of crisis: “everything that’s alright when something’s / really / wrong” (14). The Real Ethereal makes a point to abstract the crisis at hand:

making and

unmaking

poems before

poems for

poems after (6)

These lines from the book’s opening poem refuse to name the event the poems orbit—before, for, and after…what? The critical event is in the process of taking form, but the poet nonetheless diligently takes down details that might feel beside the point—registrations of light, the daily movements of living with a partner, cleaning, cooking, visiting family. Based on the moment of the publication, the reader might assume the “crisis” is the COVID-19 pandemic, and indeed the details the collection renders fit the rhythms of lockdown, but Naughton is careful not to overdetermine this reading, allowing the crisis to flex and morph as it suffuses daily life.

The first series in the collection is titled “day book,” a term for the daily accounting of a business’s transactions before the its totals are entered into a ledger. The title thus evokes the record of process before that process is consolidated, summarized, and flattened into narrative. A string of short-term memories before the mind has slept and sorted, prioritized and deprioritized moments to store them in long-term memory’s record. As readers we are asked to inhabit, continually, the sense (or tense?) of something nascent—a difficult thing to sustain, but Naughton achieves it beautifully, walking us along a precipice, refusing to let us fall, but also refusing to let us rest.  The series opens in a kitchen:

waking up I smell time behind my head a paraffin burning

                                            gentle as morning as the coffee brewing

in the kitchen the timer I set

last night and poured the water and grounds as I try to make 

                                                            choices about what choices to make (9)


Time emerges as scent in the scene; its movement is atmospheric rather than sequential. What does this afford? Anxiety? Surely. The speaker stands paralyzed in the small corner assigned her: “I try to make / choices about what choices to make.” Agency here branches, protracts—all choices are nested within, and lead to, other choices. Paradoxically, this proliferation is also a diminishment. Over the next couple pages we learn that the speaker’s movements (chosen or not) are defined by labor and by financial privation: 

Naughton’s lively ear suggests fruitful puns, inviting the reader to “mean it into sound”—or, inversely, to bring sound into the business of meaning. Even here “mean” blossoms in its polyphony, suggesting scarcity and harshness in addition to sense. “Need” in the context of a kitchen’s repetitions (the coffee brewing, the washing of dishes) becomes a manhandling. The speaker needs and kneadsthis job, moves it around as she might stretch a ball of dough. Busy work yields little change. Or less cynically, domestic labor performs vital and difficult maintenance tasks, but its yields are more upkeep than progress.

Whichever crisis she is enduring, the speaker is forced to live at temporal and spatial odds with the present moment, and this displacement is mediated by money or the lack thereof: “the billowing bright day is gone we did not / have the money to keep it” (11). Later the speaker proclaims, “me I know / money / second-hand” (62). Punning again, Naughton’s phrase “second-hand” is rich in its potential readings: money as inherited not earned, OR money known only by reputation (the speaker moneyless), OR an awareness of money that is only graspable moment to moment, second by second, with and within the movements of the clock’s second hand. What are the stakes of the lyric present in a temporality so determined by wealth and hardship?

          The language of the poems comments upon the limited choices the speaker faces, but this constraint also plays out in the book’s structure: it is a series of lyric series. In the cycle of sonnets that make up the book’s second section, “hour song,” for instance, it is the length of the sonnet (its neat portioning on a page, its modularity) and its availability for circular proliferation (winking at a crown, even if its repetitions are not complete and its returns are not total), rather than its transformative potential (the volta of it all) that makes it appropriate to Naughton’s project. Any arrival is a return.

This sense of movement without progression holds at the level of the individual poem, even at the level of the line. Almost entirely unpunctuated, the poems’ run-on quality—the pliancy that emerges by a forever deferred period—renders them slippery below my mind’s fingers. Repeatedly in an expectant position, I find myself asked to wait on that next coming clause, as it might reorient the sentence before me. If in other poems such a mutability is freeing, even the site of radical possibility, here I receive it as a comment on the instability of living in precarity, the continuous sensation of not being able to get your feet under you. Or if you are standing, the sense of waiting for the ground to give itself up as the shifty substrate it in fact is:

                             … you don’t
fit in this poem your silences your distance

your time your kitchen you in my kitchen

in my silent time you making me

of sleep and failing light the wrong turn

that history kept on while I did not

saying to me my my my time you you

do exist you do exist you do you (19)

Mes and yous and mys proliferate and I, as the reader, follow them variously, taking “wrong turn(s).” The poem refuses me the punctuation that would tell me who is saying “my my my time”—the you? The I? History? Is the final line a question doubting the you’s existence? Or is it an imperative that recognizes the you’s independence from the speaker, “you do you,” period? The undecidability of these multiple emergent readings is not the jouissance of the open text, but a sobering, albeit it exquisitely rendered, portrait of what it feels like to live right now—in flux, going nowhere.

        The rhythms in “hour song” remind me of the famous “Time Passes” section in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and I feel invited to that comparison by the poem: “to sit again in the house where time passes / like in dreams suspended and waiting” (32). Woolf’s passage is famous for its compression of time (a decade in 18 pages) and its omniscience, as its point of view follows an abandoned house more closely than it does any single human character. Naughton maintains a first-person speaker, but the “I” deployed here maintains some of Woolf’s omniscient distance. Rather than being subject (agent), she is made subject (object) to time and space. A long-distance relationship stitches across the book with geographic specificity that nonetheless reads as anonymity. Ithaca? Nebraska? New Haven? The names become hooks to hang things on, but the textures that emerge—of domestic spaces, the rituals of getting ready, the variations of light glancing off a lake—remain largely uniform. The drama of the poems is, at heart, interior to the speaker without revealing much about her; this image world is quite intimate but not confessional as it refuses narrative disclosure. A privacy that nonetheless elicits recognition. The world in Naughton’s poems is held behind a glass layered with reflections and the filters of consciousness, or rather the world is that layering and language’s filtering:

I could believe in what is real

as the reflective surface

cutting the kitchen in half

reaching into its milky replication (78)

What is real in these poems, we are reminded by the title, is the ethereal. Or perhaps, the ethereal here is made real, the gaseous sense of a coming event only made concrete in the poem turning and turning it over. Either way, the toads that emerge in this imaginary garden remain subject to the poem’s “milky replication.” In the Annie Spratt photo that graces the book’s cover, snow drops blur into a reflection off glass, or are those smudges? What’s in a snow drop? The flowers are the first harbingers of spring, heads the color of the snow they signal is soon to melt. First seeing the photo, I think it shows flowers half-glimpsed behind a reflective surface, overlain with what—a tree? A signpost? Even if so, the photo’s mirror has not captured the photographer—her face, her lens nowhere to be seen.

Where to from here? Escape is expensive. The speaker reminds us, “it’s six hundred dollars / to fly across an ocean,” and we are unsure we can trust our own image of the world as we wait for things to gain definition: “I’m waiting / something changes & I don’t know it” (76). The speaker’s inability to accurately track events as they emerge leads to doubts about the fabric of our shared reality, but repetition still has potentials:

as though the sky’s daily metaphor

across the sky were not ecstatic transport

return return return return return

it’s only ever always space and time (78)

Ecstatic transport? The book closes on a “threshold” that is more cloud than portal, time exiting the book as it entered it, figured as a scent:  

in the sun coming out

of the floorboards

a scent of pine and wax

a temperature

a structure of time

we made and are making (81)

I look for a self but cannot find her, all that’s available is the structure that coordinates her absence—“a structure of time / we made and are making.” Return return return return return.