The Tradition

by Jericho Brown Narrated by Jericho Brown

Overview

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry



Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award



Jericho Brown's daring 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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Maya Phillips

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…

Publishers Weekly

★ 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.)

From the Publisher

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

“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

“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

 

Library Journal

★ 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

JUNE 2020 - AudioFile

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

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176050417
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	12/22/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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.

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