McCartha, Madison: FREAKOPHONE WORLD

Inside the Castle, paperback

Publication Date: August 29, 2021

Publisher Marketing: 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.

“The FREAKOPHONE WORLD is up under ours, down cavernous tracts that are mouths, bowels, and tombs. Thus, with this immersive phantasmagoria Madison McCartha is not quite speculating a future, rather enfleshing the grotesque present, the slow-grinding decay that is living. McCartha’s assured, inventive, irradiated voice renders the speaker a chimera of grievance, sensuality, insight, and orneriness chucking the shit-talk of those who’ve been below long enough to know what’s been sown, where everything is buried.” —Douglas Kearney, author of Sho

“A marvel of continuous lyric transformation, FREAKOPHONE WORLD, Madison McCartha’s debut collection, explodes like the aftermath of a funky Big Bang, bringing a wild, libidinously queer world into view. A dizzying freakologic tour as much as a tour de force of imagination, language, and design, McCartha’s vision includes their original paintings, which prove integral to the freakaphonic constellations herein.” —John Keene, MacArthur winning author of Counternarratives