A Brooklyn-based writer and DJ intermingles hip-hop-inflected sensibilities with different media forms to create a "printed mixtape" of his life... The author's genre-bending fearlessness and the compelling way he expresses his quest for identity and wholeness through words, images, and music make for a one-of-a-kind read. An emotionally rich and complex work.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Jive Poetic blends and bends genres of literature and music into odes to family and community. Multiple rhythms and algorithms, several crates of records, a little Nintendo, some reel-to-reel, some bell hooks, and various portraits live in his pages. All the time-traveling properties of music and all the time-stopping properties of memoir are alive in Skip Tracer.--Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Jive Poetic is a trifurcated genius. One part warrior poet, one part world-building DJ, one part...Brooklyn. An anthropologist of his own skin and blood and history. And if this work is evidence and artifact of what he's been searching for, then we readers are the fortunate beneficiaries of his findings. He has delivered to us bone and word, rice and rhythm. He has given us gold.--Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down

Finally, we get to hear from the poet and educator who has lit fires under hundreds of young poets. Jive Poetic mixes history, family, and social commentary to bless us with a one-of-a-kind cross-genre collection.--Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

Leave it to Jive Poetic to reimagine the memoir into a hybrid that's at once inventive, lyrical, soulful, and bracing. Skip Tracer is all these things to the hilt, plus a moving coming-of-age story and a love letter to hip-hop and the cultures that birthed it.--Mitchell S. Jackson, author of The Residue Years

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation

Pub date: 2024-07-09

Length: 160 pages