Antediluvian engages with themes of the ecstatic, desire, mental illness, and spirituality. Written in part during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book’s speaker calls on an intertextual constellation of artists as they attempt to wade through agoraphobia, parse out their relationship with God, and navigate falling in love. Overall, the landscape of the collection is a deep dive into the speaker’s psyche, and what it means to push past the confines of one’s oppressive interior.

"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

"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