The Tradition
- May 4, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
★★★★★
It’s no wonder that Jericho Brown’s The Tradition won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. As intimate as it is powerful, Brown writes unflinchingly, bravely even, with compassion and beauty and hope, about violence, terror, and trauma, about race and racism, about intimacy, about friends, family, lovers, and strangers, about the pain we carry and the pain we inflict on each other and the pain we sometimes inflict on ourselves. When my poetry turns to family, to childhood, to the hurt that resides there, and to the healing yet to come, I imagine writing any one thing as good as Brown has managed to do over and over and over again in this stunning collection.
If you’ve read The Tradition but haven’t yet read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, do so now. If you’ve read the latter but not the former, do so now. If you’ve read both, you understand what perfect companions they are to one another and, like me, are richer for it.
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