Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

In Spill , self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Race, Nonfiction, Theory, Queer, Social Justice

184 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2016

About the author

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and the Founder and Director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Brianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexis holds up a heaping teaspoon of Spillers to your tongue and you swallow every viscous mass. Poetry as science, only as exact as tracing an emotion. An interesting guide in turning inspiration, if that’s not simple of a word, into concentrated engagement. There’s plot here too, wherever it makes its home. Picking up my copy of Black, White, And In Color again. Towards a quantum mechanics of black women.

[Bogi Takács]

My review on Bogi Reads the World:

http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/poet...

This was so good!!!
______
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library (purchase request. Thank you! But now I want to purchase it for myself as well...) Disclosure: I don't know the author closely, but we were on an award jury together - which was a great experience - and I picked up the book after that.

[BK · Rating 5 out of 5]

an always necessary re-read, a tending <3

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"who said you were not their favourite song, just the song that happened to be on, that they could not turn off lest they remember their own silence?"

[Naima · Rating 5 out of 5]

** I received this book as an ARC in exchange for an honest review **

Note: tags for misogyny and racism both refer to topics covered in the book, not problems with the book.

Let me preface this with the fact that I haven't read the entire thing. I'm 53% into this book and, from all that I've read, I've learned that it isn't something you can take in in one sitting. It's a beautifully written collection of poetry (interspersed with prose), but it's so rich that reading it all at one time becomes emotionally exhausting. It's gorgeous and visceral, but I can't burn through this book like I've done others.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, you have a beautiful voice and a fantastic means of description. Half of my ARC is covered in highlights, and it's difficult to even articulate my feelings about this collection of poetry. Overall, I'm literally awestruck by it. I've been in a rut of disappointing, surface-level poetry for a white- and Gumbs, you blew that right out of the water. With a variety of narratives, though, so far, the main one has been a black woman escaping an abusive relationship and all of the steps after it... It's all been juggled effortlessly. Mark you down as one of my favorite poets, and I'll be on the look out for any new material by you!

Lines I adored:

* "the rainmaking women the rage-taking women the blood the sky so open so nose wide open can't refuse the shape of our lungs can't bear to remain above the sky sees the shoulders that shrug off hate and celebrate and hug."

* "the water waists of the undrowned women the hope floats women the strong the water knows us the whole-note women the half-step harmony song"

* "it is still just as bad as it looks. 1. let the bathtub overflow with hot water and quilt pieces. let the grit of everyday settle to sandbar. let the soap get lost in love letters. soak out their lying blue blood. let the salt of the tears she was saving and the sweat she used up scour her skin like the tough love of black teachers. let porcelain become slate against her back."

* "she thought she heard dogs barking. she knew she heard crows. she sensed a plague of locusts crowding her windows."

* "and that woman. almost the same but eyes on fire, smile almost inviting. what is she doing with my only face?"

* "she named him what he was. so gentle he would swallow it and not choke. her wrought written loops of language printed careful on the whiteness sweet as poison. before the sugar and the milk. she loved the soft blue ocean of wishing he would die."

* "she imagined the blue of her own bruises spreading daily on his insides until his muscles could not take it and his bones grew weak and bent. she wrote vitamin hate in his breakfast. receipt for how her life was spent."

* "she could breathe. that much. she could breathe. and maybe her ribs felt it too much but it was there."

* "she drew her letters on with eyeliner. a straight line was not a bruise. a shadowed eye was not black. a penciled arch was innocence, not bewilderment, not desperation. she would draw the face she wanted. and then wear it. yes she would."

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This powerfully, musically written book is so strong, I had to read it in bursts or be overwhelmed. Even the Table of Contents and Acknowledgments read as poetry. Created in response to Hortense Spillers’ _Black White and In Color_ , this work stands on its own, but the footnote on every poem linking it to a piece of Spillers’ gives the sense of viewing only one part of a triptych. To be completely satisfied, I’d want to read both pieces individually and then in concert. Gumb’s scholarship and art are sufficiently strong to draw the reader into her passionate intertextual project, and I’d love to see an edition that brought the texts together in one volume.

[Marissa Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for black poets. It changes your perception of poetry, what is a poem, and who can be a poet. This is a book I sleep next to. This is a book I bring with me on long journeys.

[M. Ainomugisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this prose & poetry collection, Gumbs maintains intimate literary conversations with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Phillis Wheatley, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelley Eversley, and several other Black feminist writers—or as Gumbs describes them: “the literary archive of freedom-seeking black women”.

Hortense Spillers, whom the first first syllables of her last name title the book, says of it and Gumbs that “Nobody else is like Alexis. The kind of conversation that the text is setting up between poetry and prose, and between a poetic posture and a scholarly posture, I don't think I've ever seen that.”

The pieces Gumbs offers cut through spatial and temporal fibers of the works cited placing Spill in a unique location within Black feminist vaults of literature.

It’s sincerely one of the most incomparable, flooding and bewitching non-fiction texts of our time.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyricized theory, theoricized lyric. Absolutely gorgeous and utterly unique, though at times overwrought. There are certainly pieces from this collection that could be cut, that feel extraneous to the narrative throughline Gumbs creates, but these weaker pieces are absolutely overshadowed by the powerful intellectual, emotional fusion –– no, not even fusion, but felt knowledge, archived feeling –– Gumbs brings forth. Read Hortense Spillers before diving in.

[Tavia Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this for an online class. i wish i had been able to read it in person and really discuss some of the individual poems and what certain things were referencing. overall i can tell it’s really good but there was a lot of it that i was confused on and just didn’t fully comprehend and i wish i had been able to discuss it more.

[Hunter Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this one for book club. Love when poetry has some rhyme and meter so that was fun. Content was good as well! definitely a few in this book that I could see myself coming back to. Would love to read it again in the future.

[staykind · Rating 3 out of 5]

depth, humor, meaning. well written & worth reading.

[Abbey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goddamn.

[Ella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the most beautiful book I'll read in 2017. Wow.

[S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never considered myself in a state of fugitivity, but Gumbs laid bare my entire life of movement to this point, physical and emotional. An unexpected work of truth and tenderness.

[King Ma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am an inpatient reader of poetry. I tend to gobble poems up, rushing to the end as if all meanings lies there. Reading this collection was an exercise in patience and training my attention. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is very subtle and deliberate. I had to be careful and stay focus. Any short mental drift, even for a couple of words/seconds caused me to miss something big. I’m looking forward to a second read through and am excited to read Hortense Spillers’s works so I can more deeply understand the conversation that is happening. Favorites are: “why be content with the lightning bug when you can have the lightning?” (p. 144), “a vocabulary of gesture-both verbal and motor” (p. 81), “in this case we embrace untruth gladly” (p. 38), and “the old love of the collective for the collective is lost” (p. 150).

[Amy Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful, haunting book.  Alexis Pauline Gumbs has a complete mastery of the English language, and uses it to her advantage as she pushes and pulls against what it means to be a black queer woman in today's society.  Broken up into several different sections, each section presents a scene representing that definition of what it means to spill.  

I think my favorite poem was the very first--it was so raw and emotional and unabashed.  Each piece in this book is just utterly incredible, toying with our ideas of preconceived notions, playing with the idea of what it means to be poetry and to be acceptable and beautiful and in love.  

Review cross-listed here!

[Jas · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

I love Alexis Pauline Gumbs and her methodology behind poetry. Some of the poems were really moving but I give it a 3.5 because she can drone on a bit. I connected to most the texts she indirectly references and, when I did, it was like ah! That text! She's magnificent. I just think this maybe could have been shorter (but clearly I am biased against the poems about indirect texts I haven't read).

[Katie Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is small but packs a punch. Dense, riveting, beautiful, gumbs uses poetry as literary and social critique. This is the story of history, violence, and resilience. This is the story of reclaiming power and defying the logic of a broken system.

This book isn’t easy and it wasn’t meant to be. But it’s still worth every moment.

[Molly Roach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity by alexis pauline gumbs

I really enjoyed this book. It was quite beautifully written. It’s poems that are all written in response and conversation with Hortense Spillers’ essay ‘Black, White, and In Color.’ Each poem or ‘scene’ revolves around different aspects of Black feminist theory and praxis.
4.5/5⭐️

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a beautiful collection of poems. I took my time reading it and enjoying it one chapter at a time, but I’m almost tempted to start rereading it immediately because I know there’s so much more I can get out of these poems.

[Karis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"when slavery is crawling i am grown. i am fierce. i am known. i am continents wide. the seed is long since sown. i have flown. when blood becomes brown i am the shaved head crown. deeper than down i am core. and before. i am more." (131)

[Debs · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVE LOVE LOVE!
This book is amazing!

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m speechless this book is so good. Can’t wait to read it again and again.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a beautiful collection of words

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixture of stream of consciousness poetry with rhyme with spoken word...gorgeous stuff. You can get lost in it.

[Tameeka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems for Black women finding freedom.

[Jerusha Beebe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I see myself returning to this often. There is magic in these pages.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very creative concept that also manages to be compulsively readable poetry. Uniquely compelling.