"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: NPR
2019 Poetry Preview”
“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)
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.
