https://www.smallpresstraffic.org/upcomingevents/freakophone-world
The event starts this Friday, Feb. 18th at 6p PST / 9p EST, and includes readings from artist-poets Ava Hofmann, Never Angeline North, An Duplan, and Vi Khi Nao. I hope you'll share the news, and RSVP at https://www.smallpresstraffic.org/feb-rsvp .
The virtual exhibition space is still under construction, but will be publically available the day of the reading; you'll be able to find updates on social: (IG) @mccarthamadison @smallpresstraffic (Twt) @MadisonMccartha @smallpresstraff
You can also read more about FREAKOPHONE WORLD here: http://www.insidethecastle.org/freakophone-world/
& here: https://www.madisonmccartha.com/freakophone-world
Some advanced praise:
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 freakophonic constellations herein.
—John Keene, author of Counternarratives, and MacArthur grant recipient
Like a spider web, the FREAKOPHONE WORLD is a sub-detectible version of our own— sub-detectible, that is, until it's right in our face—and then it is our face. Madison McCartha's debut volume serves as a svelte, arachnoid landing site for their multimodal project of presencing the katabatic, freakophone web whose filaments we tremble as we shiver, sleep and shake.
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
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. Their 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, author of The Vegas Dilemma
”The kinetic sorcery of Madison McCartha’s FREAKOPHONE WORLD is vested in the kaleidoscopic potential that it gathers, holds, and ultimately releases in newly made arrangements. Think of this potential as an incision— a honed wound that reveals layer upon layer of logic. The logic is steadfast but mutable, and it continuously orders and reorders itself. Infinite trials of how-can-we-be enter the frame. Through the viscous words and images inside this collection, McCartha presents a series of punctuated, percussive replies to the initial how-can-we-be. The replies can be set side-by-side just long enough for their discrete components to exist in the same frame— then they find their rightful movement alongside new peripheries. In the paintings inside FREAKOPHONE WORLD, there are moments where we enter a whole wilderness of longing, where McCartha invites us to reconsider the empirical limits of scale, scope, and containment. FREAKOPHONE WORLD lays bare the endless electric entanglements that exist. McCartha guides the reader to them, precisely aligning the frame before shifting it again.”
–Asiya Wadud, author of No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body