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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award
"100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review
One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021
"By some literary magic--no, it's precision, and honesty--Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."--Craig Morgan Teicher, "'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview" for NPR
"A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem."--Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown's "Dark" (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019)
"Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men."--O, The Oprah Magazine
Named a Lit Hub "Most Anticipated Book of 2019"
One of Buzzfeed's "66 Books Coming in 2019 You'll Want to Keep Your Eyes On"
The Rumpus poetry pick for "What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner"
One of BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019"
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
Author Notes
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Tradition, Jericho Brown earned his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. His first book, Please (New Issues), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal. Brown is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Vahni Capildeo's formally ambitious new collection, Skin Can Hold (Carcanet, £8.99) recalls the memoiristic polylogues and prose poems of Measures of Expatriation , which won the Forward prize for best collection in 2016, and embraces the same interrogative approach towards identity. By contesting the suppression of voice through colonial violence, this Trinidadian Scottish writer reclaims the shame of silence and self-censorship: "Shame on behalf of others is tiring [...] flips into fury." However, with three playlets inspired by Muriel Spark, mime poems, Caribbean masquerade and a lyric remixing of Shakespeare's dramatic speeches, this new collection is a tour de force of theatrical speculation. Capildeo experiments with call and response "syntax poems" based on the work of Martin Carter, Guyanese poet and political activist. "Four Ablutions" gives a series of surreal stage directions, and "Game, to finish: Hamlet Oulipo" invites audience participation. The work is extraordinarily perceptive about the limits of language - "commonly accused of failure, / thrown like rope" - and as a former OED lexicographer Capildeo idealises poetic form as "infinite tonguetwister, / untranslatable in transit". Capildeo defends the "antipoetic and destructive" and reminds us that the purpose of the poem extends beyond pleasure. Anthony Anaxagorou's After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins, £9.99) is a novel response to anxieties surrounding the growth of the immigrant-descended population, informed by his British and Cypriot heritage. Foraging in "the scrap heap of history", the title poem traces the origins of race science and various means of classification, condemning the "white noose" of its reductive assumptions. Referencing Brexit, Trump and the refugee crisis where "children peppered oceans / like ends of warm bread", a deep mistrust towards current political structures is deftly balanced with a playful contempt towards bureaucratic box-ticking. As faith in the establishment falters, the poet speaks out "against darkness" to a divided nation and seeks the solace of home, whether assigned or adopted. "Some roots / have been in the earth / for so long / they know only to call themselves earth." Anaxagorou, pointing out the near "impossible / to master" pronunciation of his surname, recognises language as a tool both "for closeness. for closure". Reaching out to the reader, and "needing the answer to be more than echo", a discursive meditation on a family photograph betrays the desire to simply belong: "still my sadness / can be nothing but human, / flummoxed and looking to forget". Writing similarly from a place of otherness in search of common ground - "I am a they in most of America" - Jericho Brown 's The Tradition (Picador, £10.99) is a poignant series of lyrical peregrinations where each "poem is a gesture toward home". The abused black body, mistaking violence for desire, wrestles with the cruelty of murder and mass shooting: "I am ashamed of America / And confounded by God," the speaker announces in "Stake". In spite of the shattered "American dream", there remain glimpses of hope, of gratitude, of resilience: "In the dream where I am an island, I grow green with hope. I'd like to end there." Inventing the duplex - a clever combination of sonnet, ghazal and blues, whose couplets explode binary forces from within - Brown asserts formal adroitness in the face of prejudice: "You come with a little / Black string tied / Around your tongue, / Knotted to remind / Where you came from". Sensitive to these struggles yet undeterred, The Tradition is a prayer for unity where "bodies / Of several / Shades [might be] arranged / For one sound".
New York Review of Books Review
JERICHO BROWN's third poetry collection, "The Tradition," opens with a poem called "Ganymede." It begins as an unassuming reframing of the Greek myth in which Zeus kidnaps a beautiful boy, but swerves into a charged recrimination of the victim ("Don't you want God / To want you?") and then takes a sudden jump into the context of slavery: "And when the master comes / For our children_" This "master" emerges near the end like a sharp note in a song, tonally and narratively dissonant from the earlier mythological imagery. History and myth meet, however, in their mutual understanding of victimhood and subjugation, and Brown ends by moving beyond self-recrimination to solemnity: "The people of my country believe / We can't be hurt if we can be bought." 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. The collection characterizes blackness in a number of ways: as a speck, as flowers primed to be cut down. (The title sonnet ends with some tragic, familiar names: "John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.") 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. "Dark" may be synonymous with "morbid" or "dark-skinned," and "black" may connote death or ethnicity. That's the point, of course, as Brown's wellplaced juxtapositions of words and phrases and themes allow contexts to bleed together. A writer who tends toward neatness, in the sense of formal order and lyrical restraint, in most poems Brown uses straightforward syntax studded with short sentences and questions pointed like arrows. In others, like "Shovel," he flexes to the occasion; he mostly abandons the short sentences for winding, enjambed ones strung out by conjunctions and prepositions to lead us, with calculated precision, to lines about the nature of haunting. And in "As a Human Being," about a domestic altercation, the poem's obsession with pairs - repeated words and sentence structures - draws attention to the adjacency of a thing to its relative: the speaker to his father, his father to his mother, his mother to him. Every relationship is a study in proximities. But it's Brown's invented form, the "duplex," a 14-line poem of staggered couplets that's part pantoum, part sonnet and part ghazal, that showcases his particular strengths, in linking phrases and images, repeating words in a kind of transactional exchange of distance between the speaker and the reader; the repetition invites us forward only to push us slightly backward, a rhetorical push-pull that lands us back at the line where we started. In this sense, Brown's poems are flirtatious, teasing us with moments of sexual and emotional vulnerability. "Though the spring be less than actual, / Men roam shirtless as if none ever hurt me," he hints in one of his more riveting duplex poems, and a few pages later, he admits, "I'd oblige because he hurt me / With a violence I mistook for desire." Brown's speaker also reveals himself in the exquisitely executed "Layover," an account of an assault alluded to throughout the collection. A stripped-down streamof-consciousness account that rolls down the page without interruption by punctuation, the poem reads like a long pant, fast and yet halting, due to the sharp enjambment. The scene isn't performed or dressed up in metaphor, but rather delivered with the small, specific details that make a story come devastatingly to life: Near everyone In Dallas is Still driving At 3:24 a.m. Off 1-20 where I was raped Though no one Would call it That It takes us two-thirds of the way through the book to get to this revelation; Brown works up to the more intimate pieces, about assault, relationships and an H.I.V. diagnosis, prepping us along the way with hints of what's to come. "My body is a temple in disrepair," he writes in one duplex. There are countless poets of the body, but the body in Brown's poetry serves as a nexus of the corporeal and conceptual. The "body" of his work isn't just a physical, individual one; it's a stand-in for various (flawed) institutions of power and belief: national history, religion, mythology, the justice system. Sometimes conversations about the body, however, risk becoming nondescript. Breaking his neat syntax, in "After Avery R. Young," Brown writes from the view of a collective black consciousness: "Sometimes you ain't we. Sometimes you is / Everybody." Later, he continues: "The blk mind is a continuous / Mind. There is a we. I am among them." Some of the more general poems about race ("After Another Country," "Bullet Points," "The Water Lilies"), while still worth the read, get bogged down in the conceit and buried in the broad strokes of the experience they capture. Brown's best poems revel in the curiosities of their mythmaking and are selfconfrontational in their gaze, as in the blunt, bold self-address of "Dark," which begins, "I am sick of your sadness, Jericho Brown" and gruffly asserts, with an ironically singsong bounce and rhyme: "I'm sick / Of your hurting. I see that / You're blue. You may be ugly, / But that ain't new." The same shade of cynicism appears in the seductive "Trojan," which finds the speaker in a sexual encounter: "Candles are / Romantic because / We understand shadows. / We recognize the shape / Of what once made us / Come." Brown goes on to land the ending with characteristic aplomb; his poems delight in their own swerves, some discreetly steered toward like a bend in a road and others making a sudden about-face. "Romance is an act," he declares, before promptly drawing a tragic parallel to the infamous death of Patroclus, who "died because / He could not see / What he really was inside / His lover's armor." 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: "So the Bible says, in the beginning, / Blackness. I am alive." MAYA PHILLIPS'S first book of poetry, "Erou," will be published in the fall.
Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
THE MICROSCOPESHeavy and expensive, hard and blackWith bits of chrome for points of pride, they lookedLike baby cannons, the real children of war, and I Hated them for that, for what our teacher saidThey could do, and then I hated themFor what they did when we gave upOn stealing looks at each other's bodiesTo press a left or right eye into the barrel and seeOur actual selves taken down to a cellThen blown back up again, every atomic thingAbout a piece of my coiled hair on one slideJust as unimportant as anyone else'sGrowing in that scienceClass where I learned what little differenceGod saw if God saw me. It was the start of one fear,A puny one not much worth mentioning,Narrow like a pencil tucked behind the ear,But, by certain grace, lost when I reached for itTo stab someone I secretly loved.A bigger boy who'd advanceThrough those tight, locker-lined corridors shoving someWithout sayingExcuse me, more an insult than a battle. No large loss.Not at all. Nothing necessary to studyOr recall. No fighting in the hallOn the way to an American history examI almost passed. Redcoats.Red blood cells. Red-brickedEducation I rode the bus to get. I can't rememberThe exact date orGrade, but I know when I began ignoring slight alarmsThat move others to charge or retreat. I'm a kindOf camouflage. I never let on when I'm scaredOf conflicts so old they seem to amountTo nothing--dust particles left behind really--Like the viral geography of an expanding countryOr like the most recent name of an occupied territoryI imagine you imagine when you seeA white woman walking with a speck like me. RIDDLE We do not recognize the bodyOf Emmett Till. We do not knowThe boy's name nor the soundOf his mother wailing. We haveNever heard a mother wailing. We do not know the historyOf this nation in ourselves. WeDo not know the history of our-Selves on this planet becauseWe do not have to know whatWe believe we own. We believeWe own your bodies but have noUse for your tears. We destroyThe body that refuses use. We use Maps we did not draw. We seeA sea so cross it. We see a moon,So land there. We love land so Long as we can take it. Shhh. WeCan't take that sound. What isA mother wailing? We do not Recognize music until we canSell it. We sell what cannot beBought. We buy silence. Let usHelp you. How much does it costTo hold your breath underwater?Wait. Wait. What are we? What?What on Earth are we? What?DARKI am sick of your sadness,Jericho Brown, your blackness,Your books. Sick of youLaying me downAll so I forget how sickI am. I'm sick of your good looks,Your debates, your concern, yourDetermination to keep your buttPlump, the little money you earn. I'm sick of you saying no when yes is easyAs a young man, bored with youSaying yes to every requestThough you're as tired as anyone else yetConsumed with a singleDiagnosis of health. I'm sickOf your hurting. I see thatYou're blue. You may be ugly,But that ain't new. Everyone you know isJust as cracked. Everyone you love isAs dark, or at least as black. Excerpted from The Tradition by Jericho Brown All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.