Please

by Jericho Brown

Overview

Please explores the points in our lives at which love and violence intersect. Drunk on its own rhythms and full of imaginative and often frightening imagery, Please is the album playing in the background of the history and culture that surround African American/male identity and sexuality. Just as radio favorites like Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Pink Floyd characterize loss, loneliness, addiction, and denial with their voices, these poems’ chorus of speakers transform moments of intimacy and humor into spontaneous music. In Please, Jericho Brown sings the influence soul culture has on American life with the accuracy of the blues.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781930974791
Publisher:	New Issues Poetry and Prose
Publication date:	10/01/2008
Series:	New Issues Poetry & Prose
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	69
Sales rank:	1,060,409
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

JERICHO BROWN worked as speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans and a B.A. from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown teaches at the University of San Diego where he is the Director of the Cropper Center for Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, Oxford American, A Public Space, and several other journals and anthologies. Please, his first book, won the 2009 American Book Award.

What People are Saying About This

Claudia Rankine

“Jericho Brown’s debut collection Please resonates like aftershocks on a fault line. The poems here are hauntingly the consequence of lives lived. The silent terror in these poems is the future they seem to inform despite the attempts to integrate the incoherent with the coherent moments of lived experience. Please continually repositions its readers inside the violence of the interruption, the psychic break. To read these poems is to encounter the devastating genius of Jericho Brown: ‘If I had known the location of my own runaway / Breath, I too would have found a blues.’”

Editorial Reviews

In Brown’s Please, there is no quiet build up, there is only booming climax. The poet’s first collection of poems is masterfully presented with unique craft and conviction; Jericho Brown presents true monumental voice in American poetry. Please exemplifies brave and honest writing in a world that shrugs off or pushes away the controversial and the ugly.”—Gina Vaynshteyn, The Rumpus

From the Publisher

In a powerful debut suffused with a sense of music, a Cave Canem winner who has served as speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans captures painful private moments as well as bittersweet triumph.

—Ann Burns

Library Journal