Eve Luckring, Signal to Noise

 

I hear a voice calling her name.
I can’t tell how far away she is or from which side she answers. 

I can’t tell if she knows I am listening.
I hear her crying.

I’m intrigued by the work of Los Angeles writer and visual artist Eve Luckring, through her Signal to Noise (Chevy Chase MD: Ornithopter Press, 2025), a collection that follows The Tender Between (Ornithopter Press, 2018). Composed around a narrative of a first-person responding to an unnamed “her,” Luckring borrows her title from a phrase for the measure in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to that of background noise; her narrative, then, pings between foreground and background, located between two singular points less fixed than simply on either side. “out of an abundance of caution,” she writes, early on in the collection, “essential workers only / essentially short staffed / frauds accusing fraud / ringing the ears / 26 days / She is still there / and she wants out / absent of time / absent of touch / essential protocols apply [.]”

Held as a long poem, a book-length pastiche of fragments and self-contained lyric and prose lyric moments that layer and accumulate, almost as a novel-in-lyric, offering pointillist moments that build into a curious kind of narrative portrait. There are elements of dream-state, suggestions of a narrator unreliable, perhaps, uncertain of where the truth might lay across her own perception. “Out of the corner of my right eye,” she writes, near the end, “I lean forward and tilt sideways to get a better view. Flutter, wave, wag, flutter. In the tree shaded corner of the sidewalk, atop a thigh-high cinder block wall, what appears to be a large, partially-filled, plastic trash bag flaps back and forth lackadaisically.” There’s an enormous amount of space between and surrounding her poems, comparable to the way northern Ontario writer sophie anne edwards composed her debut novel, A Mouth of Vowels (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Luckring is adept at composing moments,

Driving. The late autumn sun low in the sky, I approach the traffic signal that faithfully announces “you are almost home.” The car slows, rolls to a stop in a long line of others. As I stare absently at the red light, a rattling starts, a familiar pattern, muffled by the loud ruminations that always follow a rough day at work. the right side of my peripheral vision dims; that sound… it’s coming from the same direction…

I turn to look; the passenger window filled with her gaunt face, rageful, spewing. Fierce eyes flash into mine as I realize the latch is being jostled in an effort to open the door. Before I can fully process what’s happening, she hits the window forcefully with her palm and strides back to the sidewalk, ranting as she hurries purposefully in the other direction. The signal now green.