Deifying A Total Darkness

In Deifying a Total Darkness, upfromsumdirt makes poetry-philosophy-cosmology-physics-literature-history travel to potential pasts, futures, and still-unset presents. Formally dazzling and brilliantly opaque, the poems spar and sing to make art beyond the decloaked ruses of colonialist (ir)rationality. “When’s the last day you weren’t force-fed enlightenment?” With this ravenous, tender, multiply erudite book, we learn to unlearn the naturalized premises of a violently defended hegemonic fragility. What a pleasure to dwell awhile in the spaces opened by these beautiful poems!

—Laura Elrick

Traveling instantly through time, existing inside and outside of history, upfromsumdirt investigates the tragic ironies by which the “moss-grown” scars and still-open wounds of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism have become, whether we’ll admit it or not, nothing less than “a modern currency”: fundamentally constitutive of modernity and beyond, at the very core of who we all are, the societies we live in and by, the art we make. This omnivorous, completely surprising debut draws on numerous historical resources and traditions—for instance, the great pan-Africanist abstract futurist traditions, or histories of science and painting, or inheritances of “long / jarring prose”—and extends and recombines them in new and bracing ways. Reveling in vocabulary and in the possibilities of the English language, infinitely dexterous, bristling with wit, joy, self-awareness and awareness of the conditions and limits of poetic practice and the po-biz, this is an unapologetically maximalist poetry with a simple and deadly serious non-assimilationist “goal: / to not be you.”

—Vivek Narayanan

upfromsumdirt is a poet, visual artist, and designer based in Lexington, KY. He is the co-founder of Wild Fig Books in Lexington, and was the co-editor the journal Mythium. His poetry and art have appeared in African American Review, New Southerner, Tidal Basin Review, About Place Journal, and Connotations Press. Deifying a Total Darkness, his debut full-length collection of poetry, follows the collection Caul & Response (Argus House/Winged City Press), and three chapbooks (two from Radical Paper Press, and one from Left Handed Juju). His second book, To Emit Teal, will be published by Broadstone Publications at the end of 2020.