Thank you NetGalley and Amistad Publishing for the review copy of Tramaine Suubi’s collection “Stages.”

Tramaine Suubi is a relatively new poet, and I feel they are going to go places. Suubi writes in freestyle, slipping through language with the grace of a dancer. They play with words, bringing depth to what could have been the ordinary, except…”upon meditating on an unkindness of ravens/ i give in to a murder of crows then slowly fade/ to a shimmer of hummingbirds”

“Body Me Water” aligns our being with the life-giving waters of the world: “river me still/ ocean me deep/ lake me quiet/ sea me through […] spring me high […] gulf me whole/ stream me loose…” (This might be my favorite in the collection, actually)

Suubi’s poem “Nostalgia” is the story of a life, any life, mine, yours: “release/ all the bull/ & sh!t-making/ the best mistakes/ of this one life, smoked/ screens show it all. such/ decadence in wildly/ heated choices, the joyful/ sorrows of this decade. the stale/ nights, the rotten days/ they all absorb & refract/ the muchness of this roaring/ decade. the yearning/ through us all.” In “First Word,” they remind us that “knowing only matters/ if you know what you do not/ know,” reaffirming that not only do we learn through schooling, but by experience as we stumble across the things we never knew we didn’t know. However, in all of this experience, we need to be brave enough to protect ourselves, to be able to say “[…] f*ck it, it feels good to stop pretending to care about caring.”

Tramaine Suubi’s poetry invites you to pause and reflect, to reread their words to explore the meaning of what it means to exist in the thing we know as life.