Bubble Gum Stadium

Bubble Gum StadiumForthcoming April 22, 2025. A home is made by the memories it holds, and in Bubble Gum Stadium, Jalen Eutsey makes us his house guests. Flush with the rich colors of South Florida, these poems immerse you in a history of a place and its people. Bubble Gum Stadium grips the reader with its immersive recollections and starkly beautiful language. Were given a scrapbook black community and coming of age, so lovingly rendered in the backdrop of West

Forthcoming April 22, 2025. A home is made by the memories it holds, and in Bubble Gum Stadium, Jalen Eutsey makes us his house guests. Flush with the rich colors of South Florida, these poems immerse you in a history of a place and its people. Bubble Gum Stadium grips the reader with its immersive recollections and starkly beautiful language. We’re given a scrapbook black community and coming-of age, so lovingly rendered in the backdrop of West Perrine. Memory offered as a gift, one Eutsey asks us to treasure; after all, what happens when it’s gone?

Praise for Jalen Eutsey

Bubble Gum Stadium is a trip. Jalen Eutsey’s study of place, race, and recollection transports us through the vibrant ballfields, parks, streets, and homes of South Florida’s West Perrine. Varied in their forms and vivid in their music, his poems traverse that richly textured landscape on a journey from adolescent naiveté into canny adulthood. Eutsey’s is a keen and singular American perspective, this is a rich and heartfelt debut, and I am just plain grateful to go along on its memorable ride. – Jaswinder Bolina, English as a Second Language and Other Poems

With clarity of attention and such a supple ease, Jalen Eutsey’s poems conjure home and its generations. Here we are in that lush reverberation of Black aliveness out of which he emerges and which he so stunningly attends. Exact, ruminative, skillful. Bubble Gum Stadium is a slim and gorgeous glimpse of Eutsey’s exquisite, singular sound. – aracelis girmay, the black maria

Jalen Eutsey’s Bubble Gum Stadium captures the nostalgia of witness that is growing up in Miami—where the city dons the jerseys of Black boys made legend, and t-shirts archive loved ones. In this suite of everyday survivals, Eutsey allows the reader to witness the spectacle of becoming that is Black boyhood. This chapbook wonders, dreams, and buzzes like the bass of a lowrider in a parade. Here, beauty and trauma are equidistant and the mundane is made canonical. – Christell Victoria Roach, Emmy-Nominated Writer & Spoken Word Artist