To Emit Teal - Poems by upfromsumdirt

Publication Date: October 15, 2020
Paperback, 104 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-72-4

Available from Small Press Distribution

The title of this new volume of poetry by upfromsumdirt packs a lot of meaning and intention into a mere three words. It is dedicated to Emmett Till, and more recent Black victims of violence, and is entirely an urgent demand for social justice. Butdon’t be fooled by the play on words, for upfromsumdirt isn’t playing around here. This isn’t a poet merely having fun with language (well, there are points where he clearly is enjoying himself), but rather a reclaiming and reinvention of language in order to engage it in the serious work at hand. In “Tea with Bojangles” he proclaims “reinvisionism is a freedom / if not a luxury, the tongues of your / indignant gods inmy painted mouth like / a mud dauber in pink cotton candy….” He knows that words have power to sting, and one word that he uses repeatedly is “Africadabra,” an act of conjuring, invoked to break “connection to the God of Chains… / His shackles leftyou spouting slave-words / from your spirit….” He knows the very language in which he writes is a legacy of slavery, and he shatters and reforges it, breaking the chain, making it a new thing. Freeing it, and with it himself, and us.

There is also a ring of science to the title, suggesting light emanating from excitation, which is no accident, for upfromsumdirt often employs the language of science, and science fiction, in his work, connecting it to Afrofuturism and the projection of afuture embracing Blackness. In “Black Wholeness: A Theorem,” he hypothesizesthat “thick = dark thighs x 40 thieves to the power of mules,” and enjoins us to“please discount all that you believe about gravity // in the romanticism of such lightless / reality a poem for love is born….”

“[S]hit happens when we raise accountants / instead of wizards,” he laments in “Playdates for Zombied Heads of State,” anxious over the world awaiting his six-year-old son. “[I]t’s as I always say: // a people without the science / to contort their skin into myth / abort the realities they want….” As a talisman against “walking rigor mortis” he places his “solemn black word” beneath the boy’s pillow. And in this volume, upfromsumdirt, wizard and poet (for are they not the same thing?) has placed many solemn black words in our ears, in hope that we might hear, and heed.

Praise for upfromsumdirt & To Emit Teal

upfromsumdirt has one of the most unique and necessary voices in contemporarypoetry. brothadirt almost always veers from the dominant narrative for the sake of correcting a narrative that is a lie. To Emit Teal operates in the African American Vernacular tradition of playfulness with a willful ambiguity that screams of echoes from the first cornfield field holla. While dedicated to Emmet Till and his impact on history. dirt, the poet, tells us that to emit teal is to divulge the impact of the blues as it relates to Black Life and Black Life Matter(s.) His natural aesthetics of countering the expected with the unexpected through subversive language is inviting; yet, it cuts with precision, opening up endless possibilities. brothadirt does not use the tools of the master to bring the house down because he understands the idea of Blackness was stolen away as art for the sake of contemporary art, as witnessed with lines like: “robbed of backstory you gave me blackface in biography placed a bid so high on birth that i can’t now afford death your welts on my back are not a Banksy yet still i excel at art: how could i not turn anything but surreal?” This is not the poetry of sameness but that of what the creative mind can accomplish when challenged.
—Randall Horton, author of {#289-128}: Poems

I’ve been chasing Brother Dirt for years, his images, his words, his mind, the man himself. As he claims in these poems, he’s a shaman, equal parts kingsnake and snake-handler. He’s a word geek, a science geek, a myth geek. He plays the fool and he’s straight-up bodhisattva tour-de-force and stone-cold craftsman. He hip-grinds and shimmy-jumps from Wile E. Coyote to Audre Lorde to Hatshepsut to Mrs. Butterworth to Carl Sagan like a Cirque de Soleil lapdancer. He may be upfromsumdirt, but he’s still rising and there ain’t no end to his smart af. Like the best poems, his roll and crunch, gut and heal. He’s Africa. He’s America. Hell, for my money, he’s Papa Legba.
—Steve Davenport, author of Bruise Songs

upfromsumdirt has precisely zero time for the politesse and deference that have congealed around officially sanctioned poetry. Knowing such congelation to be full of etymological contraband and foisted myth, he seeks to find new or occulted flows in the blood, to imagine and inhabit a space characterized not by an agreed-upon imaginary of ‘blackness’, but by an authentic chroma that reclaims stolen origins at the same time as it kicks against perduring violence. By turns sinuously toothsome and forthrightly pungent, To Emit Teal seethes with a visionary witzelsucht that is deadly “serious”. The book's dedicatee, Emmett Till, presides silently throughout as a searing and indignant reminder—but also as a promise, a vital exudation, of which only the bravest poems, like these ones, can ever be worthy.
—Colin Leemarshall, poet & critic

upfromsumdirt is the author of four chapbooks and the full-length collection, Deifying A Total Darkness (Harry Tankoos Books, 2020) available through gumroad.com/ upfromsumdirt. He is a 2010 winner of Kentucky’sAl Smith Award for Art (as Ronald Davis), whose visual work has graced the covers of The African American Review, Tidal Basin Review, Mythium Literary Journal, and various book covers for a variety of published authors. You can view his portfolio at upfromsumdirt.com, and if so moved you can find him across the spectrum of social media sites.