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: BOOTless feels like a project shaped by breath—the kind that trembles right before a truth breaks open. When you were writing these poems, what moments of personal excavation felt the most difficult to name on the page? What did your body teach you about vulnerability in the process of saying them out loud?
TraceDePass: Oh man... these are really great questions. I was someone who relied heavily on metric work for a long time. Fibonacci, syllable counting, the mathematical approach to sound. I play drums, jembe, traps. Years of dance, beatbox, acting. That all fed my poetics.
But BOOTless felt like a bridge—an intermediary book.
Now, reading these poems out loud while going through heart issues... I feel each word in my body in a way I didn’t expect. Before, I was pushing through emotional weight. Now it’s emotional and physical. Anselm Berrigan once said, “Who’s that poet that knows the sonic weight of every word?” And I thought I did—until now. The hardest things to name were the ones living beneath rhythm: family, lineage, grief, the body, the things inherited without language. BOOTless opened the door. The real excavation is happening now.
DP: Your work continues the lineage of Black poetics that refuses erasure—poems that testify, that haunt, but also excavate. In BOOTless, how did you navigate the tension between protecting your private self and offering the reader intimate entry into your interior world? Where do you draw the line between what’s holy and what’s shareable with our intended audience?
TDP: For sure. Thank you for that. I think the line is getting thinner. I try to give something—a word, a phrase—that comes from my elders, even if we didn’t always agree. They lived through so much. Their humor, their bluntness, their grief. Even when referencing them, it’s not about exposing them but engaging the lineage that made me.
I think about Southside Jamaica, about kids selling weed at the pond, asking me, “Yo, you wanna buy?” every time they see me. I don’t get to say everything directly, but I allude to the dynamics.As far as holiness —I’m leaning more into it. Naming Orishas. Wanting my hand of Ifá. Thinking spiritually. The holy is memory, climate grief, Blackness, the neighborhood, the ancestors. The poems touch each other—urban eco-poetics, climate poetics, spiritual poetics.
Some things I’ll bring up. Some things I won’t. Some things aren’t meant to live outside the poem.
DP: Can you speak to your craft decisions around form and disruption? How does fragmented language become a guide for survival for you, especially as a Black poet writing toward and through trauma?
TDP: A lot of the poems are sonnets—even the ones that don’t look like sonnets. Some are prose blocks but still 14 lines. The arrows disrupt the line. The chevrons disrupt narrative logic. It’s a refusal of the traditional sonnet structure.
Fragmentation is part of my lineage. Jamaican. Trinidadian. Shinnecock. English. Sephardic Jewish. There are ruptures everywhere—spiritual rupture, colonization, lost languages, forced migrations. So the poem breaks because the history breaks. But fragmentation is also survival. Rhythm is survival. Black people make coherence out of rupture. We always have. BOOTless is my attempt to honor that.
DP: After writing this book, what part of you feels most changed? Most freed? Most undone? is there a lesson you’re carrying with you as you move into your next work?
TDP: I’m still getting free. BOOTless taught me my voice—the clarity, the polyphony, the cohesion. It taught me how far I can push narrative and sound. How many voices I can hold in one poem. I’m getting plainer but more complex. Holier, maybe. More exact. I’m writing away from some grief now, toward love, toward God, toward healing, toward Orisha. BOOTless was a pivot point. Everything I write now feels like the poem “bootless”—the failure, the recalibration, the breaking-open, the next becoming.
Dr. Darius Phelps (he/him) is the author of My God’s Been Silent (Writ Large Press, 2026) and The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh (Kith Books, 2026). A poet before anything else, his work bears witness to grief, faith, and the act of becoming—offering language as a form of liberation and light. Through the lens of poetic inquiry, Dr. Phelps explores how verse can function as pedagogy, healing and survival. Rooted in Black literary traditions and personal testimony, his poems navigate silence, ancestry, and resilience, creating sanctuaries for voices too often unheard. His work has been featured by Diode, Een Magazine, School Library Journal, and many more across platforms that champion the power of story to honor every body, every history, and every voice.
Trace Howard DePass is the winner of the 2024 Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is the author of self-portrait as the space between us (PANK Books, 2018) and BOOTless → (Diode Editions, 2024). His work has been featured by the Poetry Foundation, Ours Poetica, Poet Lore, NPR’s the Takeaway, Sand, Entropy, Split This Rock, the Poetry Project, Bettering American Poetry and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. DePass is a fellow with Poets House, Obsidian and Teachers & Writers.