The Tradition

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021 "By some literary magicno, it's precision, and honestyBrown 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 Browns Dark (featured in theNew 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 Buzzfeeds 66 Books Coming in 2019 Youll Want to Keep Your Eyes On The Rumpuspoetry pick for What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner One of BookRiots 50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019 Jericho Browns daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Browns 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 weve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Browns mastery, and his invention of the duplexa combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the bluesis 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.