What Our Contributors Are Reading This Fall

Contributors from our Fall issue share their favorite recent finds. 

Jericho Brown

I’ve spent the past few days thinking about a poem by Jericho Brown, published this summer in The Progressive. It’s an outtake poem, one that didn’t appear in his new book, The Tradition. That’s part of what I love about the poem. Its existence—in the world, but not in the book that contains five of its brothers—suggests to me the promise of continuity. The promise of continuity suggests that writers can see a project through to a kind of completion without the danger of having to be finished with that project completely. That, in the end, there does not have to be a finite end.

According to Brown, the duplex form—his amalgamation of a ghazal, a sonnet, the blues, repeated and inverted lines, and syllabic verse, with a nod to the concept of a building with two homes inside—was ten years and a near-death experience in the making.  I love the idea that Brown is still writing his duplexes—or at least that he is still revising and publishing as-yet-unpublished duplexes—beyond the limits of his book. It seems important that a created form doesn’t just stay in one was on purpose. I’m thinking here of a person who builds a life of poetry in many ways.