Stages: Poems

"Tramaine Suubi is a visionary love poet, and stages makes a singular life feel vaster than the life cycle of a star. In this poetry of dissolution and re-making, of multiplications and expansion, embodied tenderness is a force capable of moving us "beyond the binary." As it journeys from personhood to "people-hood," Suubi's music shimmers and flashes and connects. I don't doubt Suubi when they say that "death & I talk mad shit when no one's listening," but the gift of this collection is that we get to hear it."-- Mary Szybist, National Book Award winner of Incarnadine

"Tramaine Suubi's newest book, stages, crafts new orbits to the oldest questions. As the poems circumnavigate homecomings, desires, and reclamations, the relay baton of sound and syntax passes seamlessly, always ready to hand the reader a line of true substance, a line of unexpected grace, a line of hard-won delight. Suubi insists on playfulness as a site of maturation and love as a protest against multiple erasures. And like celestial bodies, these poems can transfix, predict, and guide one through both dying and newborn light, reminding the reader, "civility is a performance you savage in your dreams." --Steven Leyva, author of The Opposite of Cruelty

"Once, we are looking at a gaggle of geese punctuating the gradient sky, meanwhile, elsewhere we are in Kampala, in Suubi's poem. Suubi navigates between the outwardly observed and the deeply internal, and the readers are at a crossroads, sometimes witnessing, other times noting the mechanical dance of our small, exiled lives. Suubi's sharp, often unblinking, gaze renders each detail with striking precision. What a collection, what a book, what a way to reinvent what African poetry can do, what it will do, what it will continue to do. A second coming that deserves all the praise for its excellence."--Adedayo Agarau, author of The Years of Blood

"So rarely do we come across a book like stages, which mirrors how a day, an hour, a moment--can engage every layer of our being. This collection will dazzle you with swirling musings which authentically ground and unground our desires, histories, and identities."--Marisa Tirado, author of Selena Didn't Know Spanish Either

Critically acclaimed writer Tramaine Suubi follows up her debut phases, with stages. This powerful meditation, written with the endurance of Lucille Clifton, focuses on choices and changes throughout life, from Yellow Dwarf to Protostar.

In this breathtaking companion poetry collection, inspired by the evolution of our brightest star, Tramaine Suubi offers poems alluding to the history of how it came to be and its effects on each human life. Readers will discover poems exploring everything from the gimmicks of capitalism to the false promises of tranquility.

This is another brilliant collection that will only reinforce Suubi as a rising star of her generation.