Antediluvian

Kameryn Alexa Carter’s Antediluvian is a linguistically sinuous and feral series of intimate cries from the heart along with demonstrations of the resilience of the spirit that are at once devotional and mutinous. She begins the first of her eleven addresses to God with the dead-serious pun, ‘Lord, this languish is dedicated to the project of my salivation— / long hungry . . .’ Carter writes of the soul in extremis, the mind at risk, of survival and of awe. Her forebears include John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Berryman, Bob Kaufman, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Reginald Shepherd. Reading this electrifying collection made me feel as if the top of my head were taken off.

In Kameryn Alexa Carter’s Antediluvian, the garden of Eden blossoms in a brain that also blossoms toward its highest self. God and psyche converge discordantly and amorously. Pills and hallucinations gird the speaker to the intangible and concrete, the body both a haunting and impossible to let go. Antediluvian is the field in which the mind and flesh go carmine with desire, the husband an anchor, dissociation and the church a liquid mirror into which the speaker smirks while disturbing the surface with a finger. Red lips. Red nail beds. These poems are blood and nectar.