Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity

Author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs 

Publisher: Duke University Press (2016)

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.

"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

"The experimental nature of the book offers a new perspective on a diasporic history of black women in the U.S. and addresses fugitivity on a global scale. Gumbs creates a dialogue between herself and Spillers and simultaneously envisions new opportunities of relating Spillers to other black feminist thinkers. In doing so she imagines new forms of poetry and critical essay writing and opens up an alternative to conventional literary practices."

–Lea Hülsen, KULT

"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