A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award, The Tradition explores cultural threats on black bodies, resistance, and the interplay of desire and privilege in a dangerous era.
... searing ... The collection, [Brown's] third, is compelling and forceful because it wonderfully balances the dark demands of memory and an indomitable strength.
Even as he reckons seriously with our state of affairs, Brown brings a sense of semantic play to blackness, bouncing between different connotations of words to create a racial doublespeak ... in most poems Brown uses straightforward syntax studded with short sentences and questions pointed like arrows. In others, like 'Shovel,' he flexes to the occasion ... But it’s Brown’s invented form, the 'duplex,' a 14-line poem of staggered couplets that’s part pantoum, part sonnet and part ghazal, that showcases his particular strengths, in linking phrases and images, repeating words in a kind of transactional exchange of distance between the speaker and the reader... Brown’s poems are flirtatious, teasing us with moments of sexual and emotional vulnerability ... Sometimes conversations about the body, however, risk becoming nondescript ... 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...
Drawing on the language of myths and flowers, Jericho Brown’s newest poems extol, dismantle, challenge, and enlarge the tradition ... The poems of The Tradition, Brown’s third collection, are at turns tender and vulnerable, severe and riveting ... The Tradition contains love poems and elegies, poems that bring into thrilling contact the tropes of 'traditional' lyric — lilies, Greco-Roman landscapes, museum paintings — with an urgency borne of threat. Brown deploys 'traditional' lyric form, too, to make his starkest and most memorable critiques ... Remarkably, Jericho Brown’s mythic retellings critique the assumptions behind them as well as the ways they justify historical and contemporary violence ... The collection’s very best poems even show the violent world pressing in on the private space of erotic lyric ... Brown handles his complicated and messy subjects with a strong sense of formal order and emotional restraint ... The Tradition revels in complexity and self-incrimination.
