The Second Stop Is Jupiter

The Second Stop is Jupiter is an Afrofuturistic poetry collection that redefines what it means to explore the Black experience. Poet upfromsumdirt is different—a "supplicant surgeon & there's / no mendicancy to this mysticism"—and his imagination is a reminder of what poetry can be, that freedom is a place where caesuras and jazz riffs roam free. Destination ain't nothing but a language trap, and—if we think deeply—maybe the end of the horizon is only a beginning?

~Randall Horton

The Second Stop is Jupiter is speculative poetry that blends myth, folktales, and science fiction in the vein of Octavia Butler and Gayl Jones. No, it's Black critical thought that takes up Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire; it's Afrofuturist funk grooving on Sun Ra and George Clinton; it's Black Arts Movement in and for the twenty-first century; it's a poetry of hope and denunciation, of resistance and liberation; it's a baroque, magic realist love song. It's all these things and more. Told in three parts and a coda, it's a space opera, a fairy tale, and an epic chronicle of liberation based on the life of Harriet Tubman, followed by a final suite of love poems. It's what happens when the nine hundred ignored faces of the hero begin to tell their stories through the cracks in the facade of popular culture and rethink its single, tidy narrative arc. The music, the puns, the varied literary and cultural allusions that pull from high and low, from print, television, and internet, from astrophysics and from across the continent of Africa, along with the self-deprecating and meta-poetic, pugilistic humor that characterize upfromsumdirt's verse grab you, pull you in, and wrestle you until they bless you.

~Jeremy Paden