Kameryn Alexa Carter is an MFA student in the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan and the co-editor of Emergent Literary. Her new book of poetry is "Antediluvian," which follows 2025's "New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh," which is about Erykah Badu's 2008 album.

We're publishing Carter's poem "Whoso list to hunt" from "Antediluvian," and below it she answered a few questions about her work.

WHOSO LIST TO HUNT

I cling to the poems I committed to memory,
even through the medicines. When I reenter
the world, I am standing in my memoir,
though I’m not quite sure when. Just ticking
off the minutes until my mausoleum rings me
up. I’ve always craved to be hailed, held.
And stability is like grasping for a meteor
as it zips past my eyes. It’s dark out there,
dark in me. I’m decked in splendor and the patent
leather I donned when I was committed

to some trickling elixir beneath my tongue—
scorched birth, syllabic lullaby, scant
lightning, sweet sleep. The devil meets me
in mirrors, and I twist my painted maw into
a smirk. I could tidy me, if I tried. I could train
my flesh into transfixion. I could recite noli me tangere
to my reflection, and yet I could never let me go.

*****

Q: Tell us about the poem's creation.
A: The first line that came to me in this poem was "I am standing in my memoir,/though I'm not quite sure when." I liked this idea of thinking of the memoir ahead of time, as looking forward to the act of looking back. And a person just leaving the hospital as tentatively being future-oriented. I also was reading [Louis] Althusser at the time, so thinking a lot about compulsory societal structures that hail us and this is where the concept of hailing becoming coupled or confused with being held came from. A good friend made me a tincture, which became the trickling elixir, and all the pieces sort of came together after that.

Q: What was the influence of the 16th-century poem "Whoso List to Hunt" by Thomas Wyatt?
A: "Whoso List to Hunt" by Thomas Wyatt is the poem that the speaker has memorized and is attempting to cling to, even as they move through the various challenges of discharge from being institutionalized. The poem is in many ways about being held by poetry itself, which has somewhat of a wry irony given that Wyatt's last couplet involves a command not to be touched. But I also think the line "Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind." is at the heart of my speaker's experience as well, in that stability or safety feels like trying to hold wind in a net for them. Something constantly evasive. So even though Wyatt's poem is often categorized as being about desire, that line has always struck me as a larger existential meditation. And lastly, the final line in Wyatt speaks to a wildness in my own speaker that is coupled with a preoccupation about seeming tame, seeming tidy.

Q: Your poem seems to play with the permeable barrier between the conscious and the subconscious, between the tangible and the otherworldly. Is this a theme that carries through Antediluvian?
A: This is absolutely a theme that carries through! In fact, these are central themes of the book. From the angle of composition, my process is incredibly associative, and I think this makes its way not only into the structure of my poems but also the ways my speakers move through their worlds. There is an outer layer at play that is perhaps hyperconscious, overinvested in staying tethered to the tangible world. But there's also an inner layer that, to me, looks like a Remedios Varo painting, or sounds like jazz. There's a strangeness that lives inside the subconscious of my speakers, always trying to shove to the surface. Part of the book's wrestling with mental illness involves the voices of the book having an impulse to trust the subconscious more than the conscious, to talk to ghosts, but feeling wary of going too far and feeling unsafe or unwell. This is a big tension over the course of the poems.

Q: Tell us about your online publication, Emergent Literary.
A: Emergent Literary was born out of a desire to create a space for black and brown artists to gather across space and time. We were really inspired by presses like Broadside and Kitchen Table Press, by salons like that of the Nardal Sisters and the Dark Tower Salon. By journals like Fire!! and Floating Bear. So many artists have been and continue to cultivate much needed outlets for black and brown voices, and our mission was to be one such place. It's been such an amazing way of creating community, more than we could have even imagined at the start.

Q: Please recommend three poetry books.
A: I would highly recommend The Selected Shepherd, a collection of Reginald Shepherd's work edited by poet Jericho Brown. It's an incredible way into his work, whether you're familiar or not, and allows for such a thorough tribute and retrospective.

Lost and Found recently published Diane di Prima's written lectures titled Prometheus Unbound as a Magickal Working, which blew my mind last year and which I'm revisiting now. Her Revolutionary Letters also feel right to return to as we experience precarity and catastrophe all around us.

Lastly, I would recommend Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones. A reimagining of Cain and Abel as young sisters, it's such an inventive rendering of a story I thought I knew by heart. The way this book explores themes of the evolution of girlhood/sisterhood, wrestling with a god to whom one's relationship is ever-shifting, and grace, is so striking!

Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp. 

Kelly Hoffer, Tracy Zeman, and Kameryn Alexa Carter read at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor, on Wednesday, February 18, at 6:30 pm.

Related:
➥ "Slash and Burn: Kelly Hoffer finds care and destruction in her new poetry collection, 'Fire Series'" [Pulp, February 16, 2026]"
➥ "University of Michigan instructor Tracy Zeman discusses her poem 'Belle Isle'" [Pulp, February 16, 2026]"