Synopsis
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.
Details
Reviews
“To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius.”Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric
“Some folks write poems, Jericho Brown writes gospel.”Danez Smith, author of Don't Call Us Dead
“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