Book Review

Katie Naughton’s first book of poetry, The Real Ethereal, is as timely as it is transcendent of time and space: it is simultaneously an inventory and a spiral, resigned and hopeful, affirming and disarming. Naughton accepts the responsibilities of life on earth with the responsibility of a poet and writer: “sounds of daily being / making patterns therefore meaning this job takes me time / I take this job and need it.”

The Real Ethereal plays out in four sections, each dealing with a uniquely challenging aspect of life while overlapping with the larger themes of environmentalism. Naughton’s speaker, trying to find balance in the twenty-first century, is confronted with the paradoxes and ironies of the everyday, dealing with climate change and class divide while always reminding the reader of the passage of time. Grappling with environmental destruction and destruction of the body in the same beat (“find someone willing / to buy our garbage the ritual the smallest pieces let them / enter into your blood / make you plastic like the ocean”), Naughton walks the tightrope of modernity, touching on the humor and pain of having bodies subject to outer forces beyond our control.

The first section, titled “day book,” places the speaker at home in the industrial city. They concern themselves with the patterns of time in the mundane:

every two hours and forty-

one minutes someone puts the last armful of items into

the car and drives

one of the roads spiraling out

east or south of the warehouse-lined roads out of town

and does not come back.

This statement, a proclamation of decay and renewal, also finds a home in those from the American Midwest and the Rust Belt. The lack of punctuation creates a skewed sense of time for the reader, and the confusion and misalignment of the speaker is made clear: “I try to make / choices about what choices to make.”

Naughton’s new and exciting style of ecopoetics finds its stride in the second section, “hour song,” comprised primarily of poems with two-to-four sonnet-length stanzas. The subjects of time, money, and heat are reiterated, compared, and contrasted: “to save the time to still in sweat heat / the afternoon to wait the sun out no / money enough for that worth of time.” Naughton’s American sonnets beg answers to unanswerable questions. Moments of weariness and wonderment paralyze the reader in their own state of indecision: Do we acquire money at the expense of time, at the expense of the earth and the climate? If the answer is no, how do we survive?

The Real Ethereal also grapples with death as the inevitable conclusion of time. In Naughton’s interview with Touch the Donkey, she discloses that The Real Ethereal was “written mostly around the time two of [her] grandparents died within a week of each other.” In the third section of the book, “the question of address,” Naughton at once deals with personal absence and the level of presence of the “addressee” in the text: “What was your voice? / Was mine? I remember / some of you and some of you / I don’t but mostly I / don’t write or speak / to you anymore.” Naughton continues with metapoetic questioning throughout this section, asking who is reading, why they are reading, and whom is left to write to: (“I am there but no one would recognize me, nor am I the subject of your work or object of it. Here you are.”). The reader, like the speaker, is left with more questions than answers. This section is also enriched by elegies, which read as reflexively mournful:

for the run from reason

for the failed economies of ecology and oil

for what we call free

we took and waved at the feet of our mother

but did not lay it down in prayer

Naughton explores these moments of mourning, anxiety, and small joy without ever letting a single theme become overpowering. Naughton’s greatest power as a poet lies in her ability to take apart these moments of desolation to find humor, spirituality, science, and linguistic complication in one fell swoop. At the end of a stanza in “the question of address (elegy: mill city),” she has us envision “a white ceramic cat a candle never burned smells like wax roses,” and in the beginning of the next stanza, “one room in the back I never go in.” There is a subtle relationship here within moments with loved ones and overconsumption, one of the many reciprocal dynamics she introduces.

In the final section, “the real ethereal,” the speaker settles into a home, finding ways to summarize their pain:

how many more days can begin with dim light

the half-asked questions the glimpse the window

of winter wouldn’t these songs weather it

the time it takes to make a living the past

isn’t even an elegy I find

In this moment, Naughton appeals to the reader: is it possible to slow time, or to understand time, through intensive observation and/or through poetry? What is an elegy without the reader for whom it elegizes? These questions, and many others, permeate each careful choice made in the book.