03/12/2026
There are some books that don’t simply speak—they breathe. Trace DePass’s BOOTless is one of them. From the opening page, the collection feels like a body learning itself again—trembling, contracting, releasing—moving toward a truth that’s been waiting beneath the skin. This is a book shaped by breath in all its forms: gasp, rupture, silence, prayer. And it’s a book that insists on returning to the marrow of things: lineage, grief, rhythm, failure, the holy, the broken, the becoming.
In our conversation, Trace and I move through the tenderness and terror of excavation—what it costs to name a thing, what it requires to speak from the wound without letting the wound speak for you. We talk about the lineage of Black poetics, that long and unbroken tradition of refusing erasure, of testifying through language that haunts, resists, and rebuilds. We press into the question every poet of witness must face: Where is the line between the sacred and the shareable? What do we protect, and what do we surrender to the page?
From there, we enter the world of form—how Trace bends, breaks, fragments, and reimagines language as a survival technology. How the sonnet becomes a site of resistance. How rupture becomes rhythm. How the body becomes both instrument and archive, especially for a Black poet writing through trauma, memory, and ancestral pulse.
Finally, we talk about change. About freedom. About what it means to write a book that teaches you your own voice, only to lead you somewhere deeper. Trace reflects on what BOOTless opened, what it allowed him to shed, and the lessons he carries with him as he writes forward—toward more clarity, more complexity, more spirit, more love.
What follows is a conversation about craft, yes—but also about breath, body, lineage, and the ever-expanding possibility of Black imagination. It is an invitation to listen closely to a poet who hears the “sonic weight of every word” and reminds us that even in rupture, there is always a rhythm leading us home.
-- Darius Phelps on BOOTless for Tupelo Quarterly
There are some books that don’t simply speak—they breathe. Trace DePass’s BOOTless is one of them. From the opening page, the collection feels like a body learning itself again—trembling, contracting, releasing—moving toward a truth that’s been waiting beneath the skin. This is a book sh...
