Eva Alter is an American poet and informational professional with roots in the Southeast and Midwest. Her work is governed by neologistic indexing: the creation, application, and accumulation of self-authored controlled vocabulary terms across poems to precisely articulate and examine complex dissociative, traumatic, and familial experiences that have patterned her life. She uses paratactic syntax derived from Biblical Hebrew, various metrical constraints, and concepts from library and information science, psychoanalysis, geology and geography, and Jewish text and law to articulate, organize, and evaluate the internal, familial, religious, and cultural mythologies that have framed her experience of complex intergenerational trauma. This interdisciplinary foundation is operational as opposed to solely referential, determining the forms, schemas, recursive vocabulary, thematic elements, and arguments that structure her work.

Her poem-systems treat intergenerational trauma and fractured identity as matters of record: indexed, translated, litigated, and re-authored through form. Her practice moves between blank verse, syllabic architectures, and documentary modes in an evolving cosmology connected by neologistic controlled vocabularies. Her debut chapbook, AUTOCARTOGRAPHIES, was published by Eulogy Press in 2025, and her work is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, BRUISER, Appalachian Journal, Burial Magazine, scaffold literary magazine, Eulogy Press, CCAR’s Reform Jewish Quarterly, and elsewhere.