Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April

Spring Ulmer will be joined by poet Karin Gottshall

Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April, is a courageous exploration of motherhood, culture, and grief, within worlds charged by both beauty and inequity. Ulmer’s sweeping sensibility moved between the living, the dead, the sorrowful, the farm, the sidewalk, and the stars. Arranged alphabetically, this unique collection is what Dianne Seuss, who chose it as the winner of the 2022 Dorset Prize, calls “[an] elegiac alphabet book of love and heartache etched with the words of poets, philosophers, activists, and heroes, from Lucille Clifton to Birdie Africa, child survivor of the MOVE bombing, from Darnella Frazier, who videotaped the George Floyd murder, to Walter Benjamin and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson…Yet for all its intellectual breadth and perceptual prowess, I love this book for its intimacy. Maybe it is the truth of all lyric poetry, that in the echo of the grieved-for, we come to know the griever.”

Spring Ulmer is the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles (selected by Sonia Sanchez for Kore Press’s 2007 First Book Award);The Age of Virtual Reproduction; Bestiality of the Involved, and Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April (selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of Tupelo Press’s 2022 Dorset Prize). Her translations of Yannis Ritsos’s Exercises is forthcoming from Ugly Ducking Presse. She lives in upstate New York with her son.

Karin Gottshall’s most recent book is The River Won’t Hold You (Ohio State University Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and Gettysburg Review. Gottshall lives in Vermont and teaches at Middlebury College.

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