Around thirty-four minutes into the cult classic They Live, John Nada walks alongside a newsstand’s many magazines. They look correct to the naked eye: Sara Richmond smiles on the April ’88 cover of Seventeen, a red Corvette glows on the May ’88 issue of Car and Driver, et cetera. But viewed through special glasses, Nada sees the magazine covers as stark white pages, each with a single subliminal message in bold, black text. The messages include OBEY AUTHORITY, CONFORM, COOPERATE, FOLLOW, SUBMIT, and BUY. Nada stops and picks up an issue of Business World. As he flips through it, a close-up shot shows some of its pages, and his glasses reveal a different subliminal message on each page.

In Calls To Action, the formatting of Namda Plume’s poems is intended to evoke the magazines’ subliminal messages, as seen by John Nada, through his special glasses. Plume’s poems are composed of phrases collected from the homepages of the twenty largest publicly traded companies in the United States. On their respective webpages, many of the phrases were displayed relatively small, but were explicitly emphasized with bold text in button containers, and set in on-brand fonts and colors. In this book, the phrases are stripped of such branding, and unified in anonymity. Their typographic treatment suggests a relationship between the subliminal messages surfaced in They Live, and some of the more persistent and pervasive contemporary calls to action.