The Tradition

The Tradition

By Jericho Brown
Unabridged
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“Brown’s hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men.”

O, The Oprah Magazine

A National Book Award Finalist

A PBS NewsHour-New York Times Book Club Pick

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

A BookRiot Pick of Must-Read Poetry Collections

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.