The Tradition
Jericho Brown
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Tradition
Jericho Brown
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... searing.
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.
Drawing on the language of myths and flowers, Jericho Brown’s newest poems extol, dismantle, challenge, and enlarge the tradition.
... 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.
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.
Brown’s voice is nuanced, proud, and profound. His work has an offbeat formality, a love of rhyme and blues.
... incredible.
Brown never gives into grievance, and these taut, thoughtful poems are much more complex than either memoir or manifesto.
Brown explores a deep connection with the ground and what lies beneath, with a past that is buried yet scattered in the air above.
Like the best poetry, these poems know, and call back to, their ancestors.
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.
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.
... 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.
... 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'.
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.
Jericho Brown’s third book, The Tradition, is his most powerful, and his most technically accomplished, yet.
... 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.
... searing.