“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 Rosal