Jericho Brown's Pulitzer Prize Poetry Collection THE TRADITION -

Jericho Brown (b Amer. 1976) has garnered many literary prizes for his poetry collections including the National Book Award and this year's Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "The Tradition."  The themes running through Brown's uniquely crafted poems are heritage, identity, HIV, theology, racism and loving & hating simultaneously.  Brown is an African Amer. gay male who feels reviled & fearful as such living in the US.  His poems are not only prescient but put pressure on the heart forcing blood to our conscience which cry out in pain & beauty.  The poem 'Of My Fury' is a stentorian declaration of the persevering persecution of men of color.  "I love a man I know could die.  And not by way of illness.  And not by his own hand.  But because of the color of that hand all His flawless skin."  Brown doesn't shy away from aids in his poetry which makes the subject palpable if not appealing.  "My man swears his HIV is better than one, that his has in it a little gold, something he can spend if he ever gets old."  Love is really the hinge  that all the poems lean and reach into our souls.  My favorite poem is 'I Know What I Love.'  "I know what I Love it comes from the earth.  It is green with deceit... Some - Times what I love just Doesn't show up at all.  It can hurt me if it Means too...because That's what in love Means."  The plaintive call resonates for all "I wanted what anyone With an ear wants - To be touched and Touched by a presence. That has no hands."  There is a simultaneous counter balance to love & torment - to physical closeness and cruelty.  The harsh & embittered emotions have a reckoning between the poet and a higher spiritual entity and an ephemeral connection of strength to the reader.  Brown breaks conventions and is courageous in unsheathing the unbearable that must be borne and dismantled.  In 'Duplex' Brown writes "My body is a temple in disrepair.  The opposite of rape is understanding.  Riddle. We do not recognize the body Of Emmett Till  We do not know The boy's name nor the sound of his mother wailing. We have Never heard a mother wailing.  We do not know the history Of this nation in ourselves."   THE TRADITION is in keeping with the illustrious echelons of poets who have previously been bestowed the Pulitzer Prize