Jessie Reyez Returns to Her Roots with a New Poetry Book Inspired by Fans
Long before Jessie Reyez earned Grammy nominations and Juno Awards, poetry was her secret sanctuary. For the Toronto-raised singer-songwriter, words came first — and they’ve never lost their grip.
Her music, a soul-baring mix of R&B, hip-hop, and Latin beats, often flirts with the line between song and spoken word. But when the music industry’s machinery dulls her creative spark, Reyez turns back to her original love: poetry.
In recent years, she’s made it a ritual to ask her millions of Instagram followers for poem prompts. What started as fleeting 24-hour stories has now evolved into a permanent print form. On Tuesday, Reyez releases “The People’s Purge: Words of a Goat Princess Volume II”, a collection of these prompts-turned-poems.
“It’s like scratching an itch in the middle of my brain that I can’t reach,” Reyez said in an interview with The Associated Press. Poetry, for her, is the purest form of self-expression — free from the pressures of chart success and commercial packaging. “You really have to be your art’s security guard,” she notes.
The prompts that feed her poems range widely — from the ephemeral (“Air,” “Breadcrumbs”) to the hilariously hyper-specific (“Stubbing your toe on the table when you were having a good day”). Each one becomes what she calls “a snapshot of the world’s emotional state.”
Reyez’s creative engine shows no signs of slowing. In addition to the book release, she’s been on tour for her latest album Paid in Memories since June. After wrapping up her U.S. book tour this month, she’ll jet off for the international leg of her music tour in November.
Whether through melody or metaphor, Jessie Reyez is reminding us that raw emotion, when given a voice, can be poetry in motion.