The Tradition // Poems

Pulitzer Prize Winner & Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award

Jericho Browns daring new bookThe Traditiondetails the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Browns 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 weve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Browns mastery, and his invention of the duplexa combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the bluesis testament to his formal skill.The Traditionis a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

“100 Notable Books of the Year,”The New York Times Book Review

“By some literary magicno, it’s precision, and honestyBrown 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 forNPR

A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem.Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Browns Dark (featured in theNew York Times Magazinein 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 aLit HubMost Anticipated Book of 2019

One ofBuzzfeeds66 Books Coming in 2019 Youll Want to Keep Your Eyes On

The Rumpuspoetry pick for What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner

One ofBookRiots50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. His first book,Please(New Issues), won the American Book Award. His second book,The New Testament, won won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal,Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets; the collection was also nominated for the NAACP award for poetry and madeThe Believers top 5 Books of the Year. Brown is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

• Item Weight:5.6 ounces
• UNSPSC:55101500
• Paperback:110 pages
• ISBN-10:1556594860
• ISBN-13:9781556594861
• Dimensions:8.8 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Publisher:Copper Canyon Press (April 2, 2019)