Phantom Number: An Abcedarium for April

Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April, 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 Forest Primeval

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

It’s a loaded deck, we all know that. Yet when we speak of power in poems, we’re often too careful, as if trying to secretly unload the dice, to slowly diffuse the bomb in the spray of the blast, mimes to the stillness of an aftermath. Meantime Spring Ulmer’s work draws its pressure—circular, irregular as flung bats—as if directly from the whirlwind itself. But, even in elegy, in grief, in fury flown inward, and outward, these aren’t metaphysical poems. Instead, as if boomeranged by the thrust from ruptures in social contracts and natural rhythms alike, we’re met, poem after poem, and line by line, with a contending force, a vital animation that moves, and moves us, according to metabolisms, lyrical, which can’t be predicted, traced, or policed. So much and so many of the living are already gone; ok. Spring Ulmer calls up the needed-beloved who are left, and some who left, to come on over and cut the deck. Let’s deal: “here we are—”… “What does it mean that everything keeps barreling on?”

—Ed Pavlic, author of Let’s Let that Are Not Yet: Inferno