ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"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."

— Vievee Francis, author of The Shared World

"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."

— Julie Carr, author of Underscore

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