Review by Jami Macarty

In her third collection, all one in the end—/water, Soham Patel draws inspiration from Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” to explore how poetry can offer grounding and community amid the disorientation of capitalism and technology. Patel’s poems are lyrical sites where we think together about where we live and how we care for it and each other, highlighting her interest in communities that “make inclusion an initiative.”

Patel crafts her poems from multiple perspectives — reader, writer, friend, sibling, and vegan with a “vata constitution” — to argue for honesty about human motivation. By referencing the vata dosha’s link to wind and ether, she clarifies her aim: to increase awareness of how “need breeds greed” and to inspire conversations that challenge how we see the world — and even “change our gaze.”

Patel shows how time shapes perspective through two poetic devices: the running title and the contrapuntal form. The running title acts as the poem’s first line and spills into the text, creating an uninterrupted flow. This compression accelerates time and pulls the reader into the poem’s immediacy. It also subverts the title’s traditional role as a separate identifier. This device encourages consideration of how we “assemble” and what we “sublimate.” The contrapuntal form expands and slows time by inviting the poem to be read in more than one way — across both columns, down one before winding to the other, or each independently. The form encourages exploration of “origins of place” and “redrawn borders.” These devices help Patel show, through poetics, how “to displace small things in order to destroy a larger trouble.”

Patel’s poetry offers art and community as strategies for confronting global “atrocities” and shared accountability. Rather than simply identifying the flaws in capitalism’s “market value” model or settler colonialism’s “stolen/zoned/purchased” and mined approach, her poetry deliberately avoids condescension or reiterating what is already known. Instead, she takes responsibility and presents alternatives — companionship, community, and “building a poetry” above the highwater mark. In all one in the end—/water, Soham Patel offers refuge.

---

all one in the end—/water by Soham Patel. Delete Press, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award. To learn more about Macarty’s writing, editing, and teaching, visit her author website.

Review by Jami Macarty

In The Real Ethereal, Katie Naughton explores the complex interplay of human experiences within temporal, economic, and artistic constraints, emphasizing the processes of “making and / unmaking.” The collection is organized into four distinct sections, each unfolding from a “weighted center / stretching extending.”

The opening section, “day book,” presents a speaker positioned “between / occupant and occupy,” wrestling with the dichotomy of what “takes me” versus what “I take.” Through a single expansive poem, Naughton explores the continuum of daily existence in a city, reflecting on the “proximity” of life through the lens of a window. The imagery the poet conjures encapsulates a world fraught with constructs both built and “torn down,” confronting the viewer with urgent realities, including “waste mass” and microplastics. The speaker sorts “waste carefully,” grappling with the moral implications of what choices to make “when something’s / really / wrong.”

The anxiety surrounding time and economic pressures continues in the second section, “hour song.” This part consists of six poems, each composed of two to four fourteen-line sections. While the sonnet multiplies, the focus shifts from day to hour, “where time passes / like in dreams suspended and waiting.” Here, the intensity of attention grows, encapsulating the notion that daily rhythms and poetry are overshadowed by “the choirs of history.”

In “the question of address,” the third section, nine epistles reflect on personal loss and nostalgia in relationships. As time unfolds elegiacally, the speaker considers familial bonds and the haunting presence of absence — “What was your voice? / Was mine?”

The final section, “the real ethereal,” raises profound questions about the act of recording amidst the failures and chaos of existence. In her thought-provoking and somatosensory debut, Katie Naughton concludes that “the only mark of unendingness we have / the refusal to stop” making.

---

The Real Ethereal by Katie Naughton. Delete Press, August 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.