Long before Jessie Reyez was celebrated for her voice, poetry was the Toronto-bred musician’s “first love.”
The Grammy-nominated and Juno Award winner’s music often feels like spoken poetry, backed by a mix of R&B, hip-hop and Latin beats. When music, and the commercial demands of the industry, fail to satiate her creative hunger, Reyez turns to writing and often asks her millions of Instagram followers for poetry prompts.
She compiled some of those poems, previously only available on a 24-hour Instagram story timeline, into a book, “The People’s Purge: Words of a Goat Princess Volume II,” releasing Tuesday.
The exercise, which Reyez now does weekly, allows her to create and release almost instantly and felt like scratching “an itch in the middle of my brain that I can’t reach,” she told The Associated Press.
“When you’re fortunate enough to find a job in creativity and you’re getting paid for your art, it can create this bastardized version of what you’re making. Some of the purity is jeopardized,” Reyez said. “You really have to be your art’s security guard.”
Reyez has written about “Breadcrumbs” and “Air.” Other prompts are specific, like one titled, “Stubbing your toe on the table when you were having a good day.” The prompts are boundless, Reyez said. “It’s like having a snapshot of the world’s emotional state.”
This year has been a busy one for Reyez, emblematic of the her non-stop creative flow. She has been on tour since early June for her latest album, “Paid in Memories.” She began a U.S. book tour this month and will return to the international leg of her musical tour in November.
She recently spoke about her upcoming book, the freedom that poetry offers and how she protects her creative flow.
