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.
