Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily and otherworldly experience of black women, she allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.
Triangle Tribune
Blending my love of Black queer feminist authors with genre bending and analytically complex poetry, Gumbs's work inflicted pleasantly unfamiliar feelings upon ... Read moreme that I cannot 'claim to have invented.' Spill transformed me from a reluctant bystander of theory and poetry into a willing and enthused participant.... Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Spill is an offering for all seeking an unpredictable and experimental journey of Black feminist artistic expression and self-discovery.
Eden Sena Kokui Segbefia
Scalawag
This book is a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. Like Audre Lorde, Gumbs writes for the complexity of her vision.
Jaki Shelton Green
NBC News (NBCBlk)
Gumbs seamlessly moves between historic reference, inherited memories, and a series of visions or a journal of dreams-the result is bigger than text itself. Her writing blurs the lines between past, present, and future. The book communes with ancestral knowledge while offering conjectures of what could be, reminding us that Black women have always seen what comes next, past the edges of what seemed or seems possible.... Spill is first and foremost a love offering to all Black women, but all readers who bear witness will leave its pages knowing of radical imagined possibilities and the difficult path laid before us toward elsewhere: 'our work here is not done.'
Zaina Alsous
Bitch Magazine
Gumbs's poetry takes up the detritus of the everyday that surrounds theory - the affective social and political worlds in which black feminist theorists write - and bends it, splits it, like a prism breaking a beam of light into a rainbow.
Maria Velazquez
The Cascadia Subduction Zone
Spill is poetry that invites the reader to imagine these poems weren't written- they was lived, they were felt, and in some deep sense, re-membered. In other words, this book happened in somebody's body, a body committed to Black Feminist ways of knowing and feeling in the world.... By embracing and applying these through the form of the parable, Spill speaks to the radical, spiritual power that belongs to those 'black women who made and broke narrative.'
Lara Mimosa Montes
Poetry Project Review
Inspired by the work of black feminist intellectual Hortense Spillers, Gumbs' collection of poems appear as a series of powerful scenarios. Reading the volume is akin to being a member of a theatre audience. The fourth wall is peeled away and one is suddenly witness to heartbreaking, inspiring and insightful scenes depicting fugitive black women and girls - unsung and celebrated 'sheroes' - seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism.
Thomasi McDonald
News & Observer
Spill is not just a poetic collection where art meets criticism or where art is criticism. Instead, it is an intricately woven, polyvocal, ever-expansive map that details and gives rise to new and old black feminisms instructing us how to live and move with(in) these proliferating epistemologies.
Sasha Panaram
New Black Man (In Exile)
Gumbs's writing has luscious urgency and rhythmic drive, which will make it of interest beyond its titular audience.
Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
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