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    The Tradition
    The Tradition
    The Tradition
    Ebook91 pages41 minutes

    The Tradition

    By Jericho Brown

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    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.

    Editor's Note

    Pulitzer Prize winner…

    Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition” won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It’s “a collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence,” according to the Pulitzer Prize judges.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateJun 18, 2019
    ISBN9781619321953
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for The Tradition

    4.5/5

    177 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I just kept reading and reading. His best work in a career full of great work.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written, haunting and honest in the best of ways.
    • 5/5
      Good of describe and sarcastic at the racist, and the tradition itself
    • 5/5
      A m a z i n g! That’s why this one won the Pulitzer-Prize for Poetry.
    • 5/5
      This was a beautiful book of poetry, one of the best I have read this year !
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      You can read it like dreaming.

    Book preview

    The Tradition - Jericho Brown

    I

    Ganymede

    A man trades his son for horses.

    That’s the version I prefer. I like

    The safety of it, no one at fault,

    Everyone rewarded. God gets

    The boy. The boy becomes

    Immortal. His father rides until

    Grief sounds as good as the gallop

    Of an animal born to carry those

    Who patrol our inherited

    Kingdom. When we look at myth

    This way, nobody bothers saying

    Rape. I mean, don’t you want God

    To want you? Don’t you dream

    Of someone with wings taking you

    Up? And when the master comes

    For our children, he smells

    Like the men who own stables

    In Heaven, that far terrain

    Between Promise and Apology.

    No one has to convince us.

    The people of my country believe

    We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.

    As a Human Being

    There is the happiness you have

    And the happiness you deserve.

    They sit apart from each other

    The way you and your mother

    Sat on opposite ends of the sofa

    After an ambulance came to take

    Your father away. Some good

    Doctor will stitch him up, and

    Soon an aunt will arrive to drive

    Your mother to the hospital

    Where she will settle next to him

    Forever, as promised. She holds

    The arm of her seat as if she could

    Fall, as if it is the only sturdy thing,

    And it is, since you’ve done what

    You always wanted, you fought

    Your father and won, marred him.

    He’ll have a scar he can see all

    Because of you. And your mother,

    The only woman you ever cried for,

    Must tend to it as a bride tends

    To her vows, forsaking all others

    No matter how sore the injury.

    No matter how sore the injury

    Has left you, you sit understanding

    Yourself as a human being finally

    Free now that nobody’s got to love you.

    Flower

    Yellow bird.

    Yellow house.

    Little yellow

    Song

    Light in my

    Jaundiced mouth.

    These yellow

    Teeth need

    Brushing, but

    You admire

    My yellow

    Smile. This

    Black boy

    Keeps singing.

    Tiny life.

    Yellow bile.

    The Microscopes

    Heavy and expensive, hard and black

    With bits of chrome, they looked

    Like baby cannons, the real children of war, and I

    Hated them for that, for what our teacher said

    They could do, and then I hated them

    For what they did when we gave up

    Stealing looks at one another’s bodies

    To press a left or right eye into the barrel and see

    Our actual selves taken down to a cell

    Then blown back up again, every atomic thing

    About a piece of my coiled

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