Idra Novey’s Soon and Whol­ly exam­ines a vari­ety of top­ics: the speaker’s child­hood home in Appalachi­an Penn­syl­va­nia, Jew­ish Brazil­ian author Clarice Lispec­tor, the lone­li­ness epi­dem­ic, and Eri­ca Baum’s col­lages. What con­nects these top­ics is con­nec­tion — the human need for it across region, medi­um, and lan­guage. Soon and Whol­ly sur­vives our ​“newest con­tin­u­ous dis­as­ter” by find­ing equal­ly new ways of relat­ing across dis­tances, be it through exper­i­men­tal syn­tax (“If the mat­ter with the clat­ter of ear­rings is.”) or by tak­ing a road trip just to har­vest rhubarb plant­ed by an ances­tor. The author’s inclu­sion of female Jew­ish Appalachi­an and Brazil­ian expe­ri­ences also make it a col­lec­tion that does the impor­tant and often neglect­ed work of con­nect­ing the lives of Jew­ish women across time and place.

The book begins with the stand­alone poem ​“Near­ly,” a cat­a­logue of ​“almosts” and ​“near miss­es” bril­liant­ly pre­sent­ed in depen­dent claus­es — ​“near”-sentences. The rest of the book is orga­nized into four sec­tions, each of which con­tains a series that explores con­nec­tion through its themes as well as the con­nec­tion inher­ent in the series as a form. Some of these series doc­u­ment iso­la­tion — ​“O Earth: An Estrange­ment in Six Parts” is a med­i­ta­tion on cli­mate denial and tech­no­log­i­cal iso­la­tion and ​“Too Soon To Tell” is both a pan­dem­ic poem and an ekphras­tic response to Eri­ca Baum’s col­lages, which pair Baum’s long strips of paper and newsprint with Novey’s long sen­tences. While these series doc­u­ment lone­li­ness, oth­ers, such as ​“Regard­ing Mar­malade, Cog­nates, and Vis­i­tors,” are peo­pled with house­guests. Two series are writ­ten as epis­to­lar­ies: ​“Let­ters to C” is a series of let­ters Novey writes to Lispec­tor while trans­lat­ing her work, and ​“Hous­esit­ting with Approach­ing Fire” fol­lows a speak­er who can­not avert eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter because ​“what can a poet in a bor­rowed house real­ly offer in a spread­ing fire?/Maybe a few remarks on the art of denial.” These series depict a soci­ety where we can no longer con­nect to each oth­er, our bod­ies, or nature. In place of con­nec­tion, we ​“suck in some Twit­ter” and ​“mock-race over fake grass” while mourn­ing that ​“we were close/​as cog­nates once, near­ly holy/​to one another.”

The collection’s explo­ration of Appalachia serves as a con­trast to con­tem­po­rary cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny. In the first glimpse of Appalachia in the book, we see the speaker’s foot sink­ing into ​“the rot­ting chest wall of dead deer,” before which she ​“hadn’t con­sid­ered how the unknow­able might get a hold of me.” ​“The Duck Shit at Clar­i­on Creek” recalls the pol­lut­ed creek where teenagers from the speaker’s home­town would go for roman­tic encoun­ters, a creek so sym­bol­ic of con­nec­tion they sensed the creek bed ​“would claim us, hold us hard and close.” ​“That’s How Far I’d Dri­ve For It” doc­u­ments a trip back to the speaker’s child­hood home to har­vest rhubarb from a patch plant­ed by an ances­tor ​“who didn’t begin her life here, nev­er learned to write in Eng­lish, yet still man­aged to plant some­thing that peren­ni­al­ly thick­ened, red and edi­ble.” When the speak­er and her friend Helen reach the gen­er­al loca­tion of where the rhubarb should be, they real­ize they are lost, but no one is around to ask for direc­tions. Helen sug­gests ​“maybe a fel­low human would appear if we play bet­ter music.” So they ​“belt­ed Tina Turn­er and it worked: we found human­i­ty — a woman exit­ing a house, a man behind her with a stripe of hair like a skunk tail.//‘These are the peo­ple,’ Helen said. ​‘They will know what we need to know.’” ​“On Return­ing to My Home­town in 2035” imag­ines how eco­log­i­cal destruc­tion will destroy even places already destroyed by dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion: ​“Even the gun shows are gone now, even the scrap­yards, the dark­est, far­thest barns.//The strip mall, half-emp­ty since my ele­men­tary years, con­tains only chem­i­cals now.” The col­lec­tion ends with ​“After­life,” in which the speak­er remem­bers imag­in­ing turn­ing into ​“a tree with no feel­ings except in seeds and shad­ows” in order to sur­vive the pain of existence. 

Soon and Whol­ly is a book that fights its way back to human con­nec­tion — a book that com­mands us to remain open because ​“To answer yes to some­one in the dark, even to your­self, has the faint sound of col­or.” The col­lec­tion cel­e­brates the small­est vic­to­ries of reclaim­ing our human­ness, remind­ing us to claim our self­hood before tech­nol­o­gy does: ​“Exer­cis­ing your iris sends a mes­sage to your mind: it is not yet made of vinyl.//Your eyes still have a call­ing: they strain for light.”