The Tradition

To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius. --Claudia Rankine Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry. --Rain Taxi Review of Books "Brown's subtleties in the narrative create great irony, feel refined. We are led to believe the renewed expression of the speaker's homosexuality is something his father could never truly understand. Brown gives us a space for all emotional selves to come together and embrace commonality of experience." --David Crews "His lyrics are memorable, muscular, majestic... Brown's poems are living on the page." --Ilya Kaminsky "These astounding poems by Jericho Brown don't merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters--loss, desire, rage, becoming--and stay there until something necessary begins to make sense. Like the music that runs through this collection, they get inside of you and make something there ache. It's a feeling that doesn't quite go away--and you won't want it to. This is one of the most luminous and courageous voices I have read in a long, long time." --U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith Exquisite, incisive, as full of the spirit as the soil, the breath and the body, Jericho Brown's newest collection The Tradition is today's essential poetry. --John Keene