Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April

Poems that ask an urgent question:  how might a white friend write in protest of intimate Black death without becoming complicit in the commodification of Black trauma?  Phantom Number listens for an absent voice. To survive and answer to her best friend and fellow poet April Freely’s death, Spring Ulmer rips meaning apart in her poems, then repairs it, only to rip it up again. Words bend, meaning shifts—abstraction a tool Ulmer wields to better get at the question at the heart of Phantom Number: How might a white friend write in protest of intimate Black death at a time when the push is to write Black joy as antidote to the commodification of Black trauma? Ulmer understands her position is suspect yet cannot shirk her love or rage. Ulmer asks the reader to do the work or else. Her abstracted poems vibrate, emotion emerging from a poem made rag. Ulmer’s abecedarium long form holds these fragments, inviting lines into an order of alliteration and words into an otherwise coherence, a belonging that has nothing to do with their origin. Phantom Number finds in abstraction a radical wail.

Table of Contents:
5 I Need a Phone 6 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Lays It Out 7 Don’t Be Dead I Love You So 8 A Ghost Says: Go and Tell the World What You Have Seen 9 A Child’s Notebook 10 A Phone Rings 11 Unmoored 12 After April 13 A Poet’s Life 14 Ash Pours Down the Chimney 15 Bye! 16 Can Words Reach the Dead? 17 Ch’ixi 18 Clouds on the Flowerbed 19 Dead 20 Ditch the Empire 21 Double Mask 22 The World’s First Suicide Bomber 23 Fatally Kneeling on the Neck of 24 The Bereaved 25 Half-speech Song 26 How Much Detail to Give a Cloud 27 I Am a Mother 28 I Hear Cut Cedar Crying in the Far Field 29 Door of No Return 30 I Pass Women Sewing at their Singers and a Blind Albino Child 33 I Watch Clouds Gather 34 I’m Not Forcing You to Watch 35 Inconceivable 36 Hauled to Shore, Propped Up as Art 37 Selling Mississippi Muds at Dusk 38 On How the Police Bombed Tree’s House on Osage 39 Manumit from the Latin Manumittere: To Send Out from One’s Hands 40 Misdiagnosis 41 Moving Through Nether 42 Family Portrait with the Missing 43 My Son Hawks Handmade, Cardboard Phones 44 My Video Went World Wide for Everyone to See and Know 45 No Body 46 Marcescence 47 Of Tomatoes in the Cellar, Red, Red 48 Often April’s Cell Signal Was Scratchy 50 One-eyed Amanirenas Fights with Her Son, Buries Augustus’s Bust, and Keeps Rome at Bay 51 What It Means to Continue 52 Pears Fall Off the Tree and Rot 53 Percussion Travels at What Speed by What Conductor? 54 Ode to the Peacock Room 55 Plaque That Read Battle Now Reads Massacre 56 Schoenberg’s Painting of Mahler’s Grave 57 On the Color Line 58 Still Life 59 Symbolic Capital—a Collective Understanding of Oneself as Honorable 60 The Color of Us 61 The Distance Light Must Travel 62 The Killing of the Tick 64 The Sound of Sirens 65 The Sumerian Word for Letter the Same as the Word for Sta 66 Bats 67 These Are the Backwards Days 68 Thrombosis 69 Tomorrow We Will Continue to Say Goodbye 70 Collective Poem 71 A Photo with April 72 On Driving an Ice Cream Truck 73 Walk with Pigeons 74 What Is Spiritual and Fine 75 Where Light and Dark Remain 76 Why Try? I Once Asked 77 With the Unlivable 78 X’s Bright Shoelaces 79 Dear April 80 Unattributed Quotes

About the Author :
Spring Ulmer is the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles, The Age of Virtual Reproduction, and Bestiality of the Involved. She lives in upstate New York with her son.

Review :
"Phantom Number is a courageous exploration of motherhood, culture, and grief, within worlds charged by both beauty and inequity. There are more questions here than answers. Observations and revelations are intimately drawn from this author’s life. The work is elegiac, a song of mourning. It is a “Family Portrait with the Missing.” But those who are missing (and missed) are not left to “an absent beyond.” Those who have died are joined by (H)istory and a profound care that moves the poems out of lamentation alone and into broader purpose: connection. Between the living, the dead, the sorrowful, the farm, the sidewalk, the stars, Ulmer has a sweeping sensibility that takes in the below and above in surprising and equal measure. Yes, this is an abecedarian, which some may find too fixed, but this work is not at all staid, it is as dynamic as a son’s wonder, a mother’s search for answers, or a friend’s generosity. This abecedarian is used to haunting effect, and how better to consider the child’s questions that will eventually lead to adult understandings? How better to keep us remembering the beginning as we each approach each respective end, and ask ourselves “What It Means to Continue.” My son and I walk and walk. Whenever we come across anything dead (mouse, worm, bird), we dig a hole for it— Read Ulmer’s insightful work of startlement and it may move you out of denial into pain, yes, but also, precious possibility." "With what language, with what music, can we speak to our dead? In Spring Ulmer’s Phantom Number this impossible, aching question is addressed again and again through heartbreaking, powerful poems that nonetheless refuse to settle for elegy, refuse to rest in longing or fear, though April, the beloved friend, is gone. Instead, this book-length abecedarian insists on the and, and, and of life itself. The constraint of the alphabet feels urgent, as if without that structure, it would all overwhelm and overflow, all get away. For as much as this is a book loaded with grief and righteous rage, it is even more a book holding on to life, demanding life, almost dizzy with sensation and love for all that remains, the child, most of all, but also the “inconceivable beauty” in the fragile, temporary, and miraculous everything: ant, bat, cloud, dream, all for April, all for us, the readers, in our precarious and precious now."