The Tradition
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Editor's Note
Pulitzer Prize winner…
Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition” won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It’s “a collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence,” according to the Pulitzer Prize judges.
Description
Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award
"100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review
"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': A 2019 Poetry Preview” for NPR
“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)
“Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men.”—O, The Oprah Magazine
Named a Lit Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2019”
One of Buzzfeed’s “66 Books Coming in 2019 You’ll Want to Keep Your Eyes On”
The Rumpus poetry pick for “What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner”
One of BookRiot’s “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 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.
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About the author
Jericho Brown, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 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 teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
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Book Preview
The Tradition - Jericho Brown
I
Ganymede
A man trades his son for horses.
That’s the version I prefer. I like
The safety of it, no one at fault,
Everyone rewarded. God gets
The boy. The boy becomes
Immortal. His father rides until
Grief sounds as good as the gallop
Of an animal born to carry those
Who patrol our inherited
Kingdom. When we look at myth
This way, nobody bothers saying
Rape. I mean, don’t you want God
To want you? Don’t you dream
Of someone with wings taking you
Up? And when the master comes
For our children, he smells
Like the men who own stables
In Heaven, that far terrain
Between Promise and Apology.
No one has to convince us.
The people of my country believe
We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.
As a Human Being
There is the happiness you have
And the happiness you deserve.
They sit apart from each other
The way you and your mother
Sat on opposite ends of the sofa
After an ambulance came to take
Your father away. Some good
Doctor will stitch him up, and
Soon an aunt will arrive to drive
Your mother to the hospital
Where she will settle next to him
Forever, as promised. She holds
The arm of her seat as if she could
Fall, as if it is the only sturdy thing,
And it is, since you’ve done what
You always wanted, you fought
Your father and won, marred him.
He’ll have a scar he can see all
Because of you. And your mother,
The only woman you ever cried for,
Must tend to it as a bride tends
To her vows, forsaking all others
No matter how sore the injury.
No matter how sore the injury
Has left you, you sit understanding
Yourself as a human being finally
Free now that nobody’s got to love you.
Flower
Yellow bird.
Yellow house.
Little yellow
Song
Light in my
Jaundiced mouth.
These yellow
Teeth need
Brushing, but
You admire
My yellow
Smile. This
Black boy
Keeps singing.
Tiny life.
Yellow bile.
The Microscopes
Heavy and expensive, hard and black
With bits of chrome, 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
Stealing looks at one another’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
Reviews
What people think about The Tradition
4.3Reader reviews
- (5/5)I just kept reading and reading. His best work in a career full of great work.
- (5/5)Beautifully written, haunting and honest in the best of ways.
- (5/5)Good of describe and sarcastic at the racist, and the tradition itself
- (5/5)A m a z i n g! That’s why this one won the Pulitzer-Prize for Poetry.
- (5/5)This was a beautiful book of poetry, one of the best I have read this year !
- (3/5)In this collection of poetry Brown focuses on his identity and experiences as a gay black American son and man. And though I can recognize some or all of these themes in most-to-all of the poems, most of them are more literary than I can understand or appreciate. He uses form and structure to emphasize his meanings in ways I can't interpret, other than to know I am missing the point.That's not to say there aren't some poems here that I liked. The ones that stood out for me:The TraditionForeday in the MorningTokenDuplex: Cento (the last in the book, which may be my favorite)He uses flowers, plants, and the natural world a lot in these poems, placing humans into the natural world--and clearly people are part of nature.