The Tradition

By Jericho Brown

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 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781619321953

Jericho Brown

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.

Book preview

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Reviews for The Tradition

[Matthew Luzitano · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I just kept reading and reading. His best work in a career full of great work.

[Cecil Lycoris · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written, haunting and honest in the best of ways.

[Alpi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Good of describe and sarcastic at the racist, and the tradition itself

[Muhammad Rajab Al-mukarrom · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A m a z i n g! That’s why this one won the Pulitzer-Prize for Poetry.

[Johanna Dunkelberger · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a beautiful book of poetry, one of the best I have read this year !

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[narshkite · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Honestly, I am not a big poetry reader, and as I listened to this I knew I was missing a great deal, that I did not have the foundation to read this. That said, I was not pulled in by the moments revealed, by the use of language, by the exploration of power and the willing abandonment of power whether by an abusive Black mother, or a White person living in the ease of their privilege. I was also troubled by Brown's exploration of subjugation, and his definition(s) of rape (I have a thing about using the term generally to describe the theft of a person's autonomy and personhood. Again, I am sure it is just me.) This is one of those bad match of book and reader moments. I never urge others to disregard my opinion but I sort of do in this case.

[muddyboy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very powerful award winning collection of poetry that looks deeply into race, death and relationships. I can certainly see why the book received all the acclaim that it did. Some of my particular favorites are "Dark" a deeply personal self examination of the author himself, "Token" an insightful look into the differences between small towns and large cities and "Good White People" an unapologetic look at race .A wonderful collection from start to finish which you can reread and savor again and again.

[jim53_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Brown's new collection, which won the Pulitzer for poetry, is easy to read but difficult to comprehend. I enjoyed reading it; I'm confident that I missed a lot. His subjects include the difficulties of living as a Black man, relationships with other men, fathers and sons. He does not use complex structures, although his Duplex form stands out. He left me with some evocative images and a desire to read more of this sort of thing.

[deeehmm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You can read it like dreaming.