... 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.
... you’ll find this amazingly deft intertextuality of various traditions, which is then continued throughout the collection with a chilling interplay of whiteness and blackness. And yet, such analysis seems too sterile, too safe in light of this brilliant book ... Of course if you miss out on Jericho Brown’s powerful, delightful inventions here in The Tradition, that would be a tremendous shame ... phenomenal ...
Such 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.
Brown’s voice is nuanced, proud, and profound. His work has an offbeat formality, a love of rhyme and blues ... This little punch at the end occurs in many of Brown’s poems. They praise, they explicate, they beseech and beguile, but they won’t let you be. The book is a varied texture of canny observation, the political, and fierce, incantatory praise. The love poems are especially strong ... Sometimes, reading this book, the bursts of ecstasy and longing remind me of Christopher Smart; sometimes they remind me of no one but the poet himself, loving, longing and twisting in his being. The presence of the poet is inescapable ... The strength of his work is enhanced by Brown’s deftness with rhyme, by how well he uses it to underscore those punches.
... incredible ... 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 ... There are almost too many marvelous lines; you could wish for a couple of duds, just for a break.
Brown never gives into grievance, and these taut, thoughtful poems are much more complex than either memoir or manifesto ... Brown is subtle, and it’s that subtlety that gives his poetry power ... The leaps are as stunning as they are smooth ... While not a formalist, Brown acknowledges form, and he’s probably at his strongest when he does ... Are Brown’s brave attempts always successful? Naturally not ... In The Tradition, moreover, we might think of the Japanese word wabi, which means a defect that nonetheless enhances the beauty of the whole ... One might read The Tradition in any of a number of ways: as handbook of craft, as creed, as as platform, as statement of aesthetic, as all of these, and yet more than all of these together. What is important, though, is that one read it, and read it again.
Brown explores a deep connection with the ground and what lies beneath, with a past that is buried yet scattered in the air above ... poems offer blunt interrogations of everyday all-American values; paint intimate portraits of queerness; study the lingering complexities of a mother-son relationship. Throughout, Brown’s voice is searing, powerful and, even in hopelessness, beautiful.
Like 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.
The Tradition is in some ways a more personal book than its predecessor: for instance, we find the speaker making love (quite a lot), or remembering a school day ... But it is also, and often simultaneously, a book of injustices, beatings, death ... [Brown] is not afraid to implicate or chastise himself, either. Almost everything here bears a lyric I, and then near the end of the book he writes, 'I am sick of your sadness, / Jericho Brown' ... The book closes with a set of uncompromising love poems, which also draws on its earlier preoccupations ... There is a unity and maturity to this collection; there is also a bit too much of the same thing done in the same way, though, which was also a failing of its predecessor.
A less successful poem like 'The Shovel' is a merely competent elaboration of its first lines...Its humorless intensity and careful vagueness reminded me of a network crime drama’s cold open, a sterile tension-delivery device. But all Brown’s endings, including that poem’s, click. Successful poems predominate, and spiral out of stylish assertions to follow their own parlous implications and rhythms ... Brown has a nose for painful ambivalence.
... rich with music and spirituality—of Jericho Brown’s own making. Here, in received and new forms, the language is plainspoken and concise; the voice(s) self-aware, self-reliant, seasoned. The Tradition is a lesson in the power of craft ... Brown stakes a claim within the canon, positioning himself alongside (and in conversation with) other eminent American poets—on his terms ... There is a subtle urgency to these poems, heightened and intensified by the forms and other elements of craft that Brown uses (and subverts) ... I invite you to bring your whole person to this fine new collection. In The Tradition, Jericho Brown has brought us his.
... advances the promise of Jericho Brown’s luminous first two collections...not only by probing the violence inflicted casually and institutionally on black bodies, but by considering what the literary theorist Stephen Best describes as 'black abstraction' ... In impeccably controlled lines, which accumulate meaning as they unfold along the page, the speaker stakes a claim to valuation: of the body, yes, but also of aesthetic worth ... Intellectually challenging and lyrically thrilling, The Tradition is a welcome addition to Brown’s already accomplished oeuvre. Its trenchant investigation of police brutality, combined with its exploration of erasure, characterizes its celebration of vulnerability in the midst of extinction. What’s more, Brown’s development of the 'duplex'—a sonnet-like repetitive form, whose name recalls apartment-style housing—showcases an adept talent for eloquent lyricism. Perhaps what sets it apart, however, is Brown’s penchant for optimism, rooted in an appraisal of physicality and the beauty of particulars. In this, it is especially apropos ... For times such as ours, devastating as they may be—racially, politically, ecologically—faith in the good is all too rare, though perhaps, in the end, it’s what sustains us.
Brown aptly addresses subject matter at once universal, cultural, and personal. The fear permeating this impactful collection is a broadly human fear, but it also pertains specifically to the vulnerability of the black body, the black male body, and the black male queer body in contemporary America, thrusting us into our present moment while reminding us how we got here ... asks his audience to question their own complicity in the violence that permeates these poems ... 'The Long Way' is one of many poems in the collection that stick with you long after reading, its powerful voice amplified by the haunting repetition and stark syntax of its concluding couplet ... Stylistically, one very innovative element of The Tradition is Brown's invention of a new poetic form, the duplex.
Jericho Brown’s third book, The Tradition, is his most powerful, and his most technically accomplished, yet ... [a] stunning collection ... Grittier, more nuanced, more self-aware, wearier of the racism and violence around him, more aware of mortality and illness ... These poems are bitter, mature, sometimes funny reflections on our culture. They feel important without being ponderous, personal without being petty ... Brown’s poems still hum with their trademark lyricism ... The reader cannot ignore the steady refrain of violence in this book, violence particularly against the bodies of people of color ... The Tradition is riveting and rewarding, and although I have been a fan of all of Jericho Brown’s books, this might be the most moving and the most stark ... Jericho Brown creates in The Tradition a new kind of song, a new kind of lament, for a country and a self.
... seems to emerge out of the very middle of a life, from a vantage that sees death and catastrophe all around, is touched, knocked down, by trauma, yet persists, not in despondency or even anger but through a hardened resolve ... we can hear a poet attempting to make a pointed political statement that successfully navigates a larger chaos of interrelated anxieties. It is a stalwart act, and as I begin to reckon with those anxieties surrounding the foundational impulse of the poem, I start to read the last line differently, not as a hastily attached political signal but as a truer determination that these names will be named, despite of or through a wider confusion, as an act of political will. In an unexpected way, the conservative poetics help to enable this, giving the right dramatic/steadying pause before that last line, and perhaps, in a more theoretical way, reclaiming this traditional poetic meter with a necessary confrontation, a meaningful disobedience ... needed.
... searing ... While such lines exemplify Brown’s musical ear, his rhetorical skill shows itself in the directness of his most profound lines ... a[n] Elizabeth Bishop-like clarity ... Brown’s invented form, the duplex—a combination of sonnet, ghazal, and blues—yields compelling results, perhaps most arrestingly in its use of enjambment ... While many poems engage in formal play, Brown’s rhythms are always rooted in that of a wounded, beating heart, so that even the speaker of an ode to peaches must 'choose these two, bruised.' Brown’s book offers its readers a communion of defiant survival, but only 'Once you’ve lived enough to not believe in heaven.'
