RaveColumbia JournalSuch examinations and interrogations of whiteness are indispensable in light of this nation’s original and ongoing inability to grapple with whiteness as an infectious plague ... Reading The Tradition can be, at times, unsettling because of the ground these poems cover. They deal in themes as uncomfortable as the disposal of corpses, murder, incest, suicide, and the mythological model for pederasty. But one comes to Jericho Brown’s poetry to be troubled ... And one leaves The Tradition with more than trouble. There is ample opportunity to share in the sheer beauty of Brown’s language, to be soothed by his sense of romance, to appreciate his skill and inventiveness with form, and, as in \'I Know What I Love,\' to renew an awareness of how desire confounds us and binds us.
