The Tradition, by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jericho Brown, is my favorite collection of poetry I've read this year — a beautiful exploration of terror, politics, mythology, history, and family trauma from the perspective of a Black man. Brown is known for inventing the duplex, a form that combines the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues, built from indented couplets that repeat and rephrase earlier lines to give them new meaning. He opens most of the book's sections with a duplex, each one carrying lines that wrap up what came before or set up what follows: "A poem is a gesture toward home" ("Duplex," 16) and "I don't want to leave a messy corpse" ("Duplex," 49) are two of the most striking.
Terror
A large part of The Tradition is an exploration of terror from the perspective of a Black man in the 21st century. Brown takes on police brutality in "Bullet Points," writing, "I trust the maggots / Who live beneath the floorboards / Of my house to do what they must / To any carcass more than I trust / An officer of the law of the land / To shut my eyes like a man" ("Bullet Points," 16). The imagery of carcass and maggots is vivid, and it drives home his mistrust and disillusionment with the police system. In another poem he takes on mass shootings, writing, "Ain't that safe as any / Plan for parenthood / Mass shooting blues" ("Entertainment Industry," 42). He describes flinching at shootings on screen because of his own past experience with gun violence, and that casual admission is what makes clear just how normalized shootings have become in this country.
Politics
Building on his themes of terror, Brown explores politics beyond personal fear as well. My favorite instance comes in the poem "Hero": "No one on Earth knows how many abortions happened / Before a woman risked her freedom by giving that risk a name, / By taking it to breast" ("Hero," 11). The description of his mother lands especially hard given politics right now, and I love the recognition that children can be risky not just biologically, but to a person's own freedom. Another line in the same poem reckons with the military-industrial complex: "Gratitude is black— / Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death" ("Hero," 11). It made me think about how much of the military is built on the promise it offers poor people of color — a way out of poverty, a way to pay for college — sometimes at the cost of their lives. Brown has a gift for loading every line with meaning, so much so that simple lines like these in "Hero" carry both personal and historical weight at once.
Brown has a particular gift for infusing every single line in his poetry with meaning, so much so that simple lines are laden with both feeling and history.
Allusions to Mythology
As a fan of Greek mythology, I loved how Brown weaves different myths through the book's themes of terror and politics. The opening poem, "Ganymede," named for Zeus's cupbearer, states: "When we look at myth / This way, nobody bothers saying / Rape. I mean, don't you want God / To want you?" ("Ganymede," 5). It's a sharp point about how myths get retold to feel more palatable, or to focus on certain parts and not others — did Ganymede fall in love with Zeus, or was he handed over by his own father? In another poem, Brown uses the Iliad to talk about love, writing that "Romance is / An act / … Patroclus died because / He could not see / What he really was inside / His lover's armor" ("Trojan," 32). As someone who loves the myth of Achilles and Patroclus, I was moved by this reading — that Patroclus was so in love he couldn't see how cruel or war-hungry Achilles really was. Brown doesn't shy away from sexual assault either, as in "Of the Swan," which draws on the myth of Leda and the swan: "Immortality requires worship. / I was / The Lord's opening on Earth / A woman / With feathers strewn round / My hide" ("Of the Swan," 41). The image of feathers strewn around is a vivid, unflinching way of imagining the aftermath of Leda's assault by Zeus, and it's one example of how Brown uses myth to carry his contemporary, grounded subjects into something larger.
History
Brown also writes about history, and his own relationship to it as a Black man who grew up in Louisiana. My favorite line on this theme comes from his schooling: "On the way to an American history exam / I almost passed. Redcoats. / Red blood cells. Red-bricked / Education I rode the bus to get" ("The Microscopes," 8). Brown's relationship to his own history is more complicated than most, especially given the family trauma he writes into the book. In "Good White People," he says, "You'll have to forgive / My grandmother with her good / Hair and her good white people / And her certified good slap across / Your mouth" ("Good White People," 29). His parents were not always kind; in "Hero" he recalls his mother whipping him as a child, and elsewhere he's blunt about his family's own history of harm, writing, "Your grandfather was a murderer. / I'm glad he's dead / … He raped women / Who weren't yet women" ("The Long Way," 38). That honesty shows how Brown uses the book to process his own complicated feelings about who his family was. He sums up his view of history and his own relationship to it best here: "We do not know the history / Of this nation in ourselves. We / Do not know the history of our- / Selves on this planet because / We do not have to know what / We believe we own" ("Riddle," 28). The line rings true — we believe we own the planet but know very little about it, and so we forget our history, or wipe it out altogether.
Jericho Brown's The Tradition is ultimately brutally honest about his own trauma and his complicated relationship with terror, history, and politics, and he grounds his far-reaching metaphors in real-life events. It's no wonder it won a Pulitzer Prize.
