"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--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"--Goodreads.com.

"In the tradition of Langston Hughes' Simple Speaks His Mind Harlem Blues continues to glance at the myriad of everyday Black voices that make up America's Black Mecca. Recounted from the mouth of William Wadsworth Longfellow better know as Willie the Wino we are introduced to and come to know a myriad of personalities from the preacher and the prostitute to Saul the little Jewish butcher and Monica his African queen."--P. [4] of cover.