FREAKOPHONE WORLD

Author: Madison McCartha

Publisher: Inside the Castle (2021)

FREAKOPHONE WORLD performs both as a book-length poem and occulted terrain, which together reimagine black diasporic life in an increasingly imperiled and globalized society. The speaker in this poem comes from a long tradition—of FREAKS, outsiders, others, and spirits calling out to the living reader from the undead, black, and unapologetically freakophonic space of the text.

“Madison McCartha has the unique talent of converting each word they use into a spectral, zygotic megaphone (our many voices rising like resin) that amplifies the rare science, rare medium of their biotic rumination. Madison’s embryonic, post-watercolored art laced with the lexical, zany treatment of rectum, reticulum, septum (also ambergris, needle, ‘alloyed genitals’), and sole chromaflock are all rawboned almonds in a posthuman us waiting to be reborn into the hemline, oceanbrine, concupiscent, demon-fecund, lanky distance which they call FREAKOPHONE.”

–Vi Khi Nao