Voice Notes from the Eschaton, by Will McCollum

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The germinal seed of Voice Notes from the Eschaton was the speaker’s encounter with/in madness during the spring of 2018, an encounter live tweeted to an audience of zero. Several of those tweets were then excavated and annotatively animated years later, in 2022. This frenetic process generated, as byproducts, the twelve poems collected here.

In this work, the speaker traces topographic points of co-occurrence between obscurely resonant people and places and things and ideas. Adopting a register of mostly pleasurable paranoia, the speaker lets loose a torrent of visionary excess as he moves “between here and there and back again. And back again. And back again.” The many stations of the poems’ becomings are indisputably material in their geographies, if their psycho-subterranean coordinates are always just barely inscrutable. Voice Notes from the Eschaton is an exercise in schizoaffective revelation, an exercise in making present a certain triumphant Non-Sense.

Will McCollum is a PhD candidate in anthropology/archaeology at the University of Chicago, but he is based in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. For his dissertation project, he is excavating the workers’ quarters at an abandoned iron ore mining camp. His poetry has been featured in Spectra Poets, Apocalypse Confidential, Stone of Madness Press, Litbreak Magazine, The Gravity of the Thing, and Sobotka Literary Magazine.