Brown, an Associate Professor at Emory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for this volume in 2020.  His poetry is a quite different from the poetry I usually read by poets such as Donald Hall, Louise Gluck, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz and others.  No rhyme, short punchy sentences filled with contemporary cultural references, and most of all focused on the Black experience in America and particularly the experience of a Black gay man.

I struggled with many of the poems which protested against experiences and situations which I had trouble identifying with and therefore, fully understanding.  On the other hand, some poems such as ‘Token” in which he writes:  “Burg, boro, ville, and wood,/I hate those tiny towns,/their obligations.  If I needed/Anyone to look at me, I’d dye my hair purple/And live in Bemidji.  Look at me. I want to dye/My hair purple and never notice/You notice. I want the scandal/In my bedroom but not in the mouths of convenience/Store customers off the nearest highway. Let me be/Another invisible,/Used and forgotten and left/To whatever narrow miseries I make for myself/Without anybody asking/What’s wrong.  Concern for my soul offends me, so/I live in the city, the very shape of it/Winding like mazes of the adult-video outlets/I roamed in my twenties: pay a token to walk through/Tunnels of men, quick and colorless there where we/Each knew what we were,/There where I wasn’t the only one.” 

To really get to understand Brown’s poems I had to copy them word for word onto paper in order to see beneath the surface and connect the dots—the token Black, the need and the pain of being invisible, small town hypocrisy and the city’s mazes, the token needed at a gay video store.  Brown pulls no punches in his anger towards the hate and othering of America today.

A fuller understanding of Brown’s book may be found in the New York Times review of it by Maya Phillips at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/books/review/jericho-brown-tradition-poems.html

His poems were not easy for me to read or to fully understand, but it’s clear he’s a powerful poet and one for our times.  As my wife reminds me, we grown through discomfort.