RaveThe RumpusLike the best poetry, these poems know, and call back to, their ancestors ... These poems are formally inventive, and this book is worth reading for its \'duplexes,\' deconstructed mash-ups of the sonnet, ghazal, and blues lyric, alone. The \'duplex\' is a form invented by Brown, and he employs it artfully in five stunning poems that form the backbone of The Tradition ... These poems feel deeply personal...Yet, there is also something profoundly hopeful here ... The turning of these duplexes is what makes them so wondrous to read, and the perfect form for deep psychological connections and reflections on the human condition that Brown takes up in them ... If The Tradition is a book that offers razor-sharp social critiques about race in America, then perhaps one of Brown’s most compelling points is showcasing the paradoxical and dehumanizing experience of black Americans being simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible ... a book that confronts the issues of our time, including race and sexuality in America, living in a post-AIDS-crisis era, police brutality, and sexual violence and assault. Jericho Brown’s poems engage these issues with nuanced deftness, all the while confirming Brown as the formal powerhouse he has shown himself to be in his previous collections. Yet, despite the seriousness of the themes of The Tradition, it is positively threaded through with hope and love.
