NJ Urban Explorer Authors Poetry Book About Overbrook Asylum

WEST CALDWELL, NJ — Essex County author, urban explorer and Overbrook Asylum expert Wheeler Antabanez will appear at the West Caldwell Public Library for a free event on Sunday, Oct. 21 at 2 p.m.

Antabanez, who has written for Weird NJ, will read from his new book “Words of Overbrook” and show a video that includes “spooky interior shots of Overbrook Asylum and dramatic clips from the demolition process.”

Learn more or reserve a seat here. Seats can also be reserved by contacting Ethan Galvin at the West Caldwell Public Library, (973) 226-5441, or ethan.galvin@westcaldwell.bccls.org.

Antabanez said that when he recorded a spoken word album about Overbrook Asylum, he never intended for it to be a book, but that's exactly what happened.

"My wife kept encouraging me to do a photo book about Overbrook because I have been taking pictures of the asylum for many years," he said. "People seemed to enjoy the spoken word album on the Free Music Archive, so it made sense to combine the photographs and poems into one definitive project."

"Usually I read a lot of novels and I'm not into poems so much," Antabanez said. "After listening to the audio recordings of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski I felt like these 'Beat Poets' were teaching me a whole new form of expression. They were using sentence fragments to project vivid imagery and it occurred to me that this would be a good method for preserving my impressions of Overbook Asylum."

Curating from his archive of Overbrook photography, Antabanez overlaid hand-painted text and displayed his poems “like graffiti across the asylum walls.”

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Photos: Wheeler Antabanez