Tradition

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRYThe 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 RankineJericho 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.

To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius., Some folks write poems, Jericho Brown writes gospel., Brown’s poems are flirtatious, teasing us with moments of sexual and emotional vulnerability . . . 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., His lyrics are memorable, muscular, majestic . . . Brown's poems are living on the page., 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.

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. His first book, Please, won the American Book Award. The New Testament was winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, 2015. He received the Pultizer Prize for Poetry in 2020. He teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.