Skip Tracer by Jive Poetic

About the book:

An innovative memoir—composed of poems, prose, and photographs—that engages with the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, cultural identity, music, and masculinity, by a poetry legend.

Blending poetry and prose, music, and genealogy, Jive Poetic’s Skip Tracer is a memoir structured as a “hybrid sound system” (complete with “records,” “tracks,” “decks,” and “channels”), expertly curated to convey the complexity of Blackness in the Americas. In this ancestral and cultural excavation, Jive conducts archival and oral-history research into his family’s connections to Jamaica, Panama, Brazil, and Cuba to explore the impact of culture, environment, and family on first- and second-generation Black Americans in the United States. He also traces the profound influence that hip-hop, soul, R&B, reggae, and other popular musical genres have had on him—all the while performing a dynamic re-creation of his legendary onstage persona on the page. A raw and affecting indictment of police violence and racism in the United States, Skip Tracer is also a searingly honest exploration of personal identity, power, and privilege—all expressed in the unmistakable language, rhythm, and style that characterizes Jive’s live performances.

Praise:

"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

About the author:

Jive Poetic is a writer, organizer, DJ, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. He is founder of Insurgent Poets Society and Carnival Slam: Cultural Exchange and is the cofounder of Brooklyn Poetry Slam.

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