WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
The Tradition by Jericho Brown, is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.
A Poetry Book Society Choice
'To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius.' Claudia Rankine
Jericho Brown's daring poetry collection 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? 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.
Like with Ocean Vuong, give me poetry that has something of substance to say. From “Of My Fury”:
I love a man I know could die
And not by way of illness
And not by his own hand
But because of the color of that hand and all
His flawless skin.