Jump Ship (PB) (2019)

"At the pulsating center of Kirwyn Sutherland's Jump Ship is a historical unspooling of the American black experience, complete with a thread of justified black rage trembling through its pages. There is an honesty in this work, no matter how the voices seamlessly and brilliantly shift from one place to the next, no matter how visceral the images or musical the lyric. The monument being built here is one to honesty, and an impatience with a country's ability to reckon with itself. These poems push the canon forward by miles." - Hanif Abdurraquib

"Kirwyn Sutherland is a Philly son, Philly brother. In his voice, there are many of us. He is his own best thing, but he is also ours. Dare to "touch the hems" of these poems--scary, tender, raging--they go deep places and unpuzzle the ironies of our masked days, our terror-strewn nights. Yeah, touch their hems and then wear these brand-new bones rattling with accountability and desire, ducking and braiding "the rope-a-dope/okie-doke," and unflinching with amens." - Yolanda Wisher

"Kirwyn Sutherland's Jump Ship is a tempest and a testimony. Its language riles a brutal American calm. Reading this collection, I think of Etheridge Knight and Bob Kaufman. Sutherland, like his many poetic antecedents, reminds us the received order is actually a disorder, a crackpot cosmetic for cruel cosmologies. In documenting his own liberation through language, the poet reveals his contradictions and ambivalences in a relentless examination of injustice. He makes it plain: "That's the point, I am looking for a loss of control." Sutherland understands, when a given system breaks, that's often when the singing comes." - Patrick RosalCover