JUMP SHIP
A Chapbook
Kirwyn Sutherland’s chapbook Jump Ship is an exploration of the physical, emotional and psychological effects of racism. Each poem documents the complexity of trying to find an accurate voice to communicate the terror of invisibility. From the shock of first being called a nigger to proclaiming being “tired of taking it”, the journey in this collection details the process of removing a mask and brandishing the truth in spite of fear.
I spit the old me out
you looking at a nomad without a face
and in the loss of all the history of a created self, an internal movement is born in the wake.
“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 that 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 Rosal
Guggenheim Fellow
What People Are Saying
“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 Abdurraqi, Writer & MacArthur Fellow
“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, Former Poet Laureate of Philadelphia
“This collection sears and scorches as Sutherland's gifted poetic tongue excoriates racism and illuminates the lived, racialized Black experience in the United States in which the contemporary Black person can never quite escape the haunting, violent experience of American racism and its long-lasting psychic and physical damage. Sutherland's collection offers a moving testimony to Black survival.”
Pia Deas, Creator of Contemporary Black Canvas podcast
“In this pressurized lyric, the language rises, brims, and continues to exceed its ruined, though indestructible, Black sheath. The text is a cauldron, a vessel, a sunken treasure and a pirate's map. Its scripture will suffer you. Whether you are an initiate of its secret societies; whether you are an acolyte, a seeker, a destroyer, a tourist, or a bystander; whether you are committed to knowing or not knowing what is knowable about this poet’s deeply felt and urgently rendered experience of inheriting and inhabiting his own skin; and regardless of when or why or how you come to these pages— there is no safe passage. If you enter, you will be made to jump. Once inside, you must succumb to Sutherland’s poetry and its redeeming darkness.”
Andrea Walls, Writer, M.I.T. and BPM Fellow
“With Jump Ship, Kirwyn Sutherland drowns the air, suspends everything from a syllable, like it is dire, because it is dire. He moves between breakages, halts, pained refusals, and gashes of unexpected beauty, Blackness, and love. This book undoes me. It generates an intentional hope while dealing with the most important questions. Here is a poet who will cling to the marrow. One reading isn’t enough. I pour over it obsessively, trying to understand how its coded language can harbor so much future. This book should be read, sung, and celebrated at every riot, at every barbecue, and in every church. This is more than the music. It is life.”
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Former Poet Laureate of Philadelphia
