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. But don’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 in my 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 left you 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.
