Anyone who has ever considered The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” a love song knows how much mishearing can impact one’s interpretation of a piece. It can be forgiven, since Sting’s mellifluous crooning fools the ear into hearing a creepy and relentless “I’ll be watching you” as romantic. Human brains process sound and speech in different areas, a fact many learn the hard way when they step up to a karaoke microphone and realize that they’ve been singing the wrong words to their favorite song for years.
The simultaneous tension and possibility of mishearing is essential to E, the collection by “transgender poet with hearing aids,” Noa Micaela Fields. The collection explores both aspects of Fields’s identity in many ways, but the heart of the project is the poetic device homophonic translation. Homophonic translation, at its simplest, is a method of “translation” that attempts to convey the sound of a work instead of its meaning. Unlike pastiche or parody, these “translations” are entirely original pieces of writing, and new meaning is crafted from the auditory experience of its predecessor.
The poem that opens the collection, titled “Homophonic Trans Later,” seeks to teach the reader about this concept by demonstration, a guide to reading the collection as a whole. Constructed in parallel columns, one side is a collection of images and concepts relating to inability to hear paired with their specific “mishearings”:
“What did I miss? Wander off script
Too embarrassed to ask dare embellishment
Can you repeat that? Change of scenery
…
Ear transposes interrupting
Jumbled syntax chamber music”
Many, but not all, of the poems included in this collection are “mishearings” of parts of Louis Zukofsky’s epic poem “A,” with attributions appearing just below each title. Admittedly, I was unaware of Zukofsky’s work before reading E, and the first note I made while reading was to go out and find this book. The citations inspired an urge to approach the collection as a scholar, to dutifully read each poem with its pair, as if comparative literature would bring me somehow closer to truth. I resisted the urge to get a sense of E as a standalone collection, and I’m glad I did.
The pairing of Fields and Zukofsky might not seem obvious at first, and the essay at the end of the collection, “Notes: “A” into E,” provides additional context to this that I’ll leave you to discover. The most obvious, Googleable, connection between the two projects is the practice of homophonic translation–sections within “A” are themselves homophonic translations inspired by Zukofsky’s wife reading aloud from the Roman poet Catullus’s work. Passages in E are born of a centuries-long game of telephone that place Fields in a lineage she might otherwise have been excluded from.
This is, at its heart, a playful collection. Beyond the core translation play, Fields engages in interesting rhyme, alliteration, and puns. The shape and form of some of the poems in the collection are incredible, sitting on the fine line between poetry and visual art–a kind of verbal collage. As a device, homophonic translation is apathetic to meaning–the sound of the words themselves are what’s being manipulated. Zukofsky’s poems aren’t being answered in any kind of legible way, the sound of the poetry is replicated on a slant. With this melody, Fields explores her experience of transition and disability.
Interesting both in concept and aurally, terms like “palimpsest” recur throughout the collection; she refers to her pre-transition self as a “mishearing.” There are poems titled things like “Estradiol” and “Enjambment as Embodiment as Escape Art” that render even the table of contents its own kind of poem. The book’s final section, Louise, brings everything: Zukofsky, transness, hearing aids, pleasure, desire, joy together in a fever dream of sound and image and play.
“…my exquisite corpse correspondent
live in the flesh with a confession:
you’re on estrogen in the afterlife,
which by the way is bursting
with lesbian bars you like to frequent
where you scribble poems on napkins…”
This collection is such a fantastic exploration of homophonic translation as a device that it tickled the parts of my brain that have been dormant since I stopped teaching high school English. That the poet is a Chicagoan, inspired and sustained in writing this collection by the invaluable Gerber/Hart Library makes the experience of this collection that much sweeter. Given the world of Zukofsky and Catullus this collection has opened up for me, I suspect I’ll revisit E more than once and mishear new things in it each time. What I’ll carry from it this time is this:
“Can’t desire
for the future
be trans?”
POETRY
E
By Noa Micaela Fields
Nightboat Books
Published January 13, 2026
