The Tradition

by Jericho Brown

Overview

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

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596025
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	02/04/2020
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	125,554
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before earning 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, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets; the collection was also nominated for the NAACP award for poetry and made The Believer ’s top 5 Books of the Year. Brown is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Read an Excerpt

THE MICROSCOPES

Heavy and expensive, hard and black

With bits of chrome for points of pride, they looked

Like baby cannons, the real children of war, and I

Hated them for that, for what our teacher said

They could do, and then I hated them

For what they did when we gave up

On stealing looks at each other’s bodies

To press a left or right eye into the barrel and see

Our actual selves taken down to a cell

Then blown back up again, every atomic thing

About a piece of my coiled hair on one slide

Just as unimportant as anyone else’s

Growing in that science

Class where I learned what little difference

God 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 it

To stab someone I secretly loved.

A bigger boy who’d advance

Through those tight, locker-lined corridors shoving some

Without saying

Excuse me, more an insult than a battle. No large loss.

Not at all. Nothing necessary to study

Or recall. No fighting in the hall

On the way to an American history exam

I almost passed. Redcoats.

Red blood cells. Red-bricked

Education I rode the bus to get. I can’t remember

The exact date or

Grade, but I know when I began ignoring slight alarms

That move others to charge or retreat. I’m a kind

Of camouflage. I never let on when I’m scared

Of conflicts so old they seem to amount

To nothing—dust particles left behind really—

Like the viral geography of an expanding country

Or like the most recent name of an occupied territory

I imagine you imagine when you see

A white woman walking with a speck like me.

RIDDLE

We do not recognize the body

Of Emmett Till. We do not know

The boy's name nor the sound

Of his mother wailing. We have

Never heard a mother wailing.

We do not know the history

Of this nation in ourselves. We

Do not know the history of our-

Selves on this planet because

We do not have to know what

We believe we own. We believe

We own your bodies but have no

Use for your tears. We destroy

The body that refuses use. We use

Maps we did not draw. We see

A sea so cross it. We see a moon,

So land there. We love land so

Long as we can take it. Shhh. We

Can’t take that sound. What is

A mother wailing? We do not

Recognize music until we can

Sell it. We sell what cannot be

Bought. We buy silence. Let us

Help you. How much does it cost

To hold your breath underwater?

Wait. Wait. What are we? What?

What on Earth are we? What?

DARK

I am sick of your sadness,

Jericho Brown, your blackness,

Your books. Sick of you

Laying me down

All so I forget how sick

I am. I'm sick of your good looks,

Your debates, your concern, your

Determination to keep your butt

Plump, the little money you earn.

I'm sick of you saying no when yes is easy

As a young man, bored with you

Saying yes to every request

Though you're as tired as anyone else yet

Consumed with a single

Diagnosis of health. I'm sick

Of your hurting. I see that

You’re blue. You may be ugly,

But that ain’t new.

Everyone you know is

Just as cracked. Everyone you love is

As dark, or at least as black.

Editorial Reviews

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…

The New York Times Book Review - Maya Phillips

★ 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.)

Publishers Weekly

"To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius."

—Claudia Rankine



"Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry."

—Rain Taxi Review of Books



“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



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

—Ilya Kaminsky



“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

From the Publisher

★ 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

Library Journal

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