The poem, as it stands on the page, is a body in itself. Like a body of water, the poem can also be viewed in coastlines and depths, from the page’s white space modulations, the integrity of the line, and the words itself acting as a body with edges, currents, and geographies. Katie Mihalek is interested in how the poem can act as an interface between our own bodies, especially when considering our connection from our body to our environments. How does the poem react when it truly embodies the environment around it? How does the awareness of the poem shift between the speaker, the poem, and the environment it inhabits and becomes, and how does this awareness impact environmental consciousness? Mihalek’s current creative project investigates these themes through the concept of filtration, connecting the human urinary system and our kidneys to coastal marshlands, flow, erosion, and organisms such as oysters and seagrass that filter those waters in the poems themselves. Mihalek applies this interdisciplinary lens across health sciences, environmental sciences, and poetics as an interface for creative expression and communication of our bodies and environments. Expanding on the erasure form, Mihalek offers a new perspective on erasure through filtration in poetics, thinking about what is left behind versus what is taken out. The fluidity & filtration of our bodies and these ecosystems offers an interpretation of the poetic form’s function, not as an easily marked category or structure, but rather as a counterpoint to the subject itself. Through embodying and questioning filtration in poetic structure, Mihalek hopes to leverage water as environment and form to better understand the possibilities for the environmental poem. Mihalek will present this project as part of the New Voices in Environmental Modernisms Roundtable at the 2026 Modernist Studies Association annual conference.