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 tol

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