Stages: Poems [Paperback]

“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.”— Mary Szybist, National Book Award winner for Incarnadine

This book presents a young person seeing the world with fresh, yet discerning eyes. In stages, Suubi is seeking centeredness in an unstable world. From personal journeys throughout and between continents, Suubi asserts the freedom to be themselves, on their own terms. stages is a thoughtful, rigorous and heartfelt collection of a loving voice.  — Tracie Morris, author of human/nature

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

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 mulc