In The Tradition, Brown creates poetry that is a catalog of injuries past and present, personal and national, in a country where blackness, particularly male blackness, is akin to illness…Even as he reckons seriously with our state of affairs, Brown brings a sense of semantic play to blackness, bouncing between different connotations of words to create a racial doublespeak…In Brown's poems, the body at risk—the infected body, the abused body, the black body, the body in eros—is most vulnerable to the cruelty of the world. But even in their most searing moments, these poems are resilient out of necessity, faithful to their account of survival, when survival is the hardest task of all…

★ 04/22/2019

The searing third collection from Brown (The New Testament) begins with the luminous “Ganymede,” in which Heaven is described as “that far terrain/ between Promise and Apology.” Brown inextricably weaves exploration of race, religion, and social burden: “I am a they in most of America./ Someone feels lost in the forest/ Of we, so he can’t imagine/ A single tree. He can’t bear it./ A cross. A crucifixion. Such/ A Christian.” While such lines exemplify Brown’s musical ear, his rhetorical skill shows itself in the directness of his most profound lines. In “The Long Way,” he states plainly: “Your grandfather was a murderer./ I’m glad he’s dead.” With a Elizabeth Bishop-like clarity, the speaker describes card tables as “Slick stick figures like men with low-cut fades/ Short but standing straight/ Because we bent them into weak display.” Brown’s invented form, the duplex—a combination of sonnet, ghazal, and blues—yields compelling results, perhaps most arrestingly in its use of enjambment: “The opposite of rape is understanding/ A field of flowers called paintbrushes.” While many poems engage in formal play, Brown’s rhythms are always rooted in that of a wounded, beating heart, so that even the speaker of an ode to peaches must “choose these two, bruised.” Brown’s book offers its readers a communion of defiant survival, but only “Once you’ve lived enough to not believe in heaven.” (Apr.)

Praise for The Tradition

“To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius."—Claudia Rankine

“Jericho Brown often refers to himself as a love poet, and indeed, his third poetry collection, The Tradition, includes verses about ecstasy and longing. . . . But the book’s sweeping scope also encompasses themes of racism, sexual violence, H.I.V. and police brutality. Throughout, the Louisiana-born poet draws on mythology and history to dissect a world that often devalues the voices of Black gay men.”—Brian Keith Jackson, New York Times

“These astounding poems by Jericho Brown don't merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters—loss, desire, rage, becoming—and stay there until something necessary begins to make sense. Like the music that runs through this collection, they get inside of you and make something there ache. It's a feeling that doesn't quite go away—and you won't want it to. This is one of the most luminous and courageous voices I have read in a long, long time.”—U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

“Exquisite, incisive, as full of the spirit as the soil, the breath and the body, Jericho Brown’s newest collection The Tradition is today’s essential poetry.”—John Keene

“Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry.”—Rain Taxi Review of Books

“So much of what is both right and wrong in America is often chalked up to tradition, as this collection from Jericho Brown so astutely observes. Brown blends pastorals with the history of slavery that created those scenes. He questions freedom and safety in a nation that didn’t really mean 'all' men when it said, ' . . . all men are created equal.' Brown even invents a new form, the duplex, in this incredible collection.”—Book Riot

“Nothing screams springtime like poetry. While Jericho Brown’s collection The Tradition leans heavily on flower motifs and imagery, these beautiful poems articulate the experience of a young, gay, Black man in America. It is a heart-stoppingly gorgeous collection about love, loss, safety, and worship told through a series of pastoral poems. Brown invented his own unique form of poem, the “Duplex,” which is featured heavily in this book. Even for those who don’t normally pick up poetry, this work by a Pulitzer Prize winner is worth a read.”—Crimson

“Brown’s subtleties in the narrative create great irony, feel refined. We are led to believe the renewed expression of the speaker’s homosexuality is something his father could never truly understand. Brown gives us a space for all emotional selves to come together and embrace commonality of experience.”—David Crews

“Jericho Brown is an award-winning queer poet and creative writing teacher. His Pulitzer Prize–winning collection The Tradition explores trauma, violence, legacy, intimacy, and much more in a way that shows his mastery of language. These poems utilize Brown’s original form of the duplex, a combination of sonnet, ghazal, and blues. I recommend reading each poem through at least twice; you’ll be surprised by what comes to light in rereading.”—Book Riot

“His lyrics are memorable, muscular, majestic . . . Brown's poems are living on the page.”—Ilya Kaminsky

★ 03/01/2019

Brown's third collection (after The New Testament) pulsates with the acute anxieties of racial and sexual difference, the psychologically complex intersections of personal intimacy with social responsibility ("I'm sure/ Somebody died while/ We made love. Some-/ Body killed somebody/ Black. I thought then/ Of holding you/ As a political act.") and the inescapable legacy of violence and pain intrinsic to vulnerable lives in an unjustly constructed world ("The way anger dwells in a man/ Who studies the history of his nation"). A consummate craftsman, Brown conveys emotional and provocative content through plainspoken yet subtly lyrical forms whose delicacy only heightens the subversive force of his ideas, which can be delivered with unabashed, declarative candor (e.g., water lilies "are good at appearances. They are white"). VERDICT Though many poems here risk intruding on some readers' comfort zones, Brown's uneasy fusion of art, conscience, eroticism, and rage—like any serious poetry worth close attention—aspires to greatness within the fragmented immediacies of our historical moment while suggesting a shared human destination: "A poem is a gesture toward home." [An editor's pick, LJ 2/19, p. 23.]—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

In this third collection of poems by the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown, narrator JD Jackson steadily delivers a heartfelt narration of what Brown describes his book to be about: “the normalization of evil . . . and why these things, as heinous as they are, are normal in our time and in our culture.” In this short audiobook, Jackson is clear, moderately emphatic, and heavy-voiced. His tone expresses the gravity of the theme. While not sounding desperate, as he moves swiftly from one poem to the next, it’s as if he is saying, “You need to hear this.” The personal connection that Jackson conveys with poise and clarity is the embodiment of Brown’s words: “A poem is a gesture toward home.” T.E.C. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine