Marina Burana

Variations on Life and Grief: Phantom Number, an Abecedarium for April by Spring Ulmer

            If you don’t know that this book is dedicated to April Freely, a poet who unfortunately died prematurely, your mind may think of the month of April. You might even connect it with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where “April is the cruellest month…” In Ulmer’s and Eliot’s works there is despair, grief, and emptiness. Reading both texts feels fragmented, like pieces subjected to constant change. The connection between the two, if only for a fleeting moment, could occur. Indeed, Phantom Number is about connecting the dots; about joining the pieces of a larger dialogue with the world, as you edge forward on a fragile web where things work better as parts of a whole rather than as self-contained entities. And so, we immerse ourselves into each poem as if we were entering a phantom’s realm, a ghostly world of fragility and uncertain boundaries, always striving to understand that whole through the combinations of its parts. Ulmer herself said that this book is “like a long poem,” in which “the fragments all speak to each other.” About the process, she mentioned she might be like an “action painter poet,” shattering things and then cleaning up the mess. As she searched for form, the poems said otherwise. I can’t help but think that it must have been a truly unique and wonderful kind of mess, one that gave birth to this fantastic book of poetry.

            The first poem, “I Need a Phone,” sets a very particular tone. We feel the urgency of the title. And as it progresses on the page, we understand the fragmentation, the strong breaks articulating a very personal and intimate use of language.

“—Phones for sale! Phones for sale! Phones for sale! Two little phones—

—I need a phone that can talk to the dead.

—They can talk to bats. Two little bat phones for sale! Two little bat phones for sale!”

(Ulmer, 2025:3)

            We are confronted here with the duality in discourse, with the necessity of an other to initiate a conversation, yet the very nature of that conversation—calling the dead—renders it impossible. But upon closer inspection, we realize this is actually a call to life, a plea for survival, for hope, transcending mere references to the deceased. “How can we forge ahead in the aftermath of death?” could be a hidden question. This way of opening the journey of the book makes me think, also, of disappearance. I feel that something is swiftly slipping away, and that there is an urgent desire to rescue it from fading into oblivion; a need to ask about the reconstruction of what is left within the confines of absence. I suddenly remember: calls to a phantom number are automatically forwarded to voicemail: something is lost, something is unanswerable and something lingers on. 

            There exists an insurmountable abyss within some of these poems, a poignant and unyielding sense of frustration and rage, a relentless search for answers to agonizing questions about social disintegration, injustice and the deeply painful rejection of alterity. In some ways, the whole book reads as a long, unanswered/unanswerable question. Like climbing a flight of stairs, each fragment (poem) builds upon the previous one, constructing small blocks of meaning—quiet and not-so-quiet worlds of language that strive to find their own place, only to realize that the ascent may lead nowhere.

            There is grief here, mourning, but also, as I have mentioned, a pressing necessity to look forward, to construct and deconstruct the fragments of a puzzle in order to release that grief, and, also, to tell a story: that of the unspoken or neglected, that of the spaces between us. I have the feeling that these poems talk about the past with a deep sense of the future, establishing an intimacy that is, at times, daunting. There are turning points, variations, and transformative changes that reshape grief into a new experience, isolating it into fragments, then making it complete again, and adding an element of promise and deeper reflection on our reality, as pieces ourselves of a collective.

            This book is a book of courage and sorrow, of introspection and challenges. It is a dialogue—a fractured conversation—with a friend who has departed. But also an ongoing discussion that urges us to delve deeper into our shared humanity. An invitation to talk amongst ourselves from the perennial standpoint of our emotions and from the raw reality of a common rationale. Each poem, a letter in a long abecedarium of pain, hope and exploration.

            The very last poem is a letter to April and ends, “Your number in my phone appears as a.” (Ulmer, 2025:83). This is the last page of the abecedarium, but it concludes at the outset, with a circularity that mirrors life and grief and death. And life again.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Spring Ulmer: PHANTOM NUMBER with Karin Gottshall.” (Interview). Visiting Authors Series: April 30, 2025 from Writers & Books.

Ulmer, Spring. (2025). Phantom Number: an Abecedarium for April. Tupelo Press