Kameryn Alexa Carter is a poet and founding coeditor of Emergent Literary, a journal for the work of black and brown artists. She was a visiting teaching artist at the Poetry Foundation and is a Pushcart Prize winner. Her work has appeared in Bennington Review, Phoebe Journal, Torch Literary Arts, Bat City Review, The Best American Poetry 2023, and elsewhere. She is the author of Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh.

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.--Phillip B. Williams, author of Ours: A Novel

Kameryn Alexa Carter casts an unforgettable spell in the divine and decadent Antediluvian. As she writes in "Theoria" 'I'm a practical mystic: / approachable at the grocery or in line / at the movies.' An incantatory musicality governs this collection, and it's as delicious to read aloud as it is to experience on the page. Carter marshals her impressive gifts in poems inspired by art history, Biblical figures, and Black literary forebears. She explores physical and spiritual longing as well as mental and physical health with candor and verve. This is a poet unafraid to sing in the dark and to listen for what calls back.--Derrick Austin, author of Tenderness

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.--Michael Dumanis, author of Creature

The opening poems in this collection hit me right in the heart. Carter understands human want and desire better than anyone.-- "Debutiful"

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Pub date: 2026-02-24

Length: 72 pages