The Tradition

"Jericho Brown’s masterful collection is an unflinching examination of the rituals, stories and identities that make us. In these poems, Brown explores the places where violence and love intersect and play out in both behavior and language. The result is subversive. The title poem, a sonnet (traditionally a love poem), begins with flowers and ends with the names of slain black men. Brown builds on poetic tradition with his own invention, the duplex, a form that draws on the sonnet, the blues and the ghazal – a formal response to poetic inheritance that says: We make this our own."