Jericho BrownRecensioni

1 Corinthians 13:11

When I was a child, I spoke as a child.
I even had a child's disease. I ran
From the Doberman like all children
On my street, but old men called me
Special. The Doberman caught up,
Chewed my right knee. Limp now
In two places, I carried a child's Bible
Like a football under the arm that didn't
Ache. I was never alone. I owned
My brother's shame of me. I loved
The words thou and thee. Both meant
My tongue in front of my teeth.
Both meant a someone speaking to me.
So what if I itched. So what if I couldn't
Breathe. I climbed the cyclone fence
Like children on my street and went
First when old men asked for a boy
To pray or to read. Some had it worse -
Nobody whipped me with a water hose
Or a phone cord or a leash. Old men
Said I'd grow into my face, and I did.

Jericho Brown's collection has the ability to be both mesmerizing with it's tightly packed lines and painful. But the thought that keeps recurring with each read is that there's a lot of love in these poems. Not the overly sentimental love. Critical, honest, at times harsh.

In Brown's 'Duplex' that begins the third section he owns this intent: 'I begin with love, hoping to end there / I don't want to leave a messy corpse.' A kind of brutal honesty that wants the person, place, thing the poem is confronting - to be there tomorrow - knowing in the present culture of fear and its violent offspring - that is not a given.

Nothing, whether it's lovers, family, community, faith, escapes this critical eye - something Brown ties together in 'Stake' when he asks 'How / old will I get in a nation / that believes we can grow out / of a grave' (43). For the poems' harshness they carry with them an undercurrent of hope that is never far away, but a current that requires digging beneath the false mythologies in order to find it. Important, essential collection.

Bullet Points >>>>

"You come with a little
Black string tied
Around your tongue,
Knotted to remind
Where you came from"

A book of bitterness, trauma, and generational resentment. Good poetry, but a difficult collection to get through.

How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill, edited by Jericho Brown, is a fascinating collection of advice and pointers that stops short, thankfully, of the many books that make writing sound like simply following steps. This volume, while highlighting the many steps that are essential to writing, have as much or more to do with the subtle aspects of those steps and the important element of the writer's mindset.

This will be a valuable addition to any writer's library, especially those of color or, frankly, any other writer who feels they are or have been marginalized. This is about finding how best to express oneself, not in a lock step approach but in one that looks inward as much as backward to already published writers. Knowing what to do is great, knowing how to adapt that knowledge to what you want to express is even better. And that is where this book makes its largest contribution.

If you're not a writer, or if, like me, you write mostly for yourself, this is still a useful book since it helps readers better understand what goes into a writer's choices. Knowing that allows a reader to better do their part in making the story both the writer's and the reader's.

I enjoyed every essay in the book, but the one I think really spoke to me was Curdella Forbes' essay on kinship. While definitely speaking to the craft of writing, and by extension reading, it also touches on our everyday interactions in the world. I found it to be both a wonderful expression of an empowering perspective and a more open-minded and -hearted way to understand people in general.

Highly recommended for both writers as well as readers who want to be more active in their engagement with books, from novels to poetry and memoirs.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

Beautiful, lyrical, and full of integrity.

Summer 2021 (July);

I started a grand quest through a large assortment of poetry & short story collections recommended from my APSI (AP Summer Institute) for AP Literature, and this is one of the many as you will see.

A brand new piece by an author I'd not heard of yet, I found my experience with Jericho Brown's piece eye-opening and surprising. He has an amazing lyrical way with words, and I was moved toward tears during a few different pieces in this.

Manifold expressions of anger and emotions and insights arising from the difficult realty facing a gay African-American HIV positive poet.

Powerful, overwhelming, seriously....almost perfection.

Honestly, I am not a big poetry reader, and as I listened to this I knew I was missing a great deal, that I did not have the foundation to read this. That said, I was not pulled in by the moments revealed, by the use of language, by the exploration of power and the willing abandonment of power whether by an abusive Black mother, or a White person living in the ease of their privilege. I was also troubled by Brown's exploration of subjugation, and his definition(s) of rape (I have a thing about using the term generally to describe the theft of a person's autonomy and personhood. Again, I am sure it is just me.) This is one of those bad match of book and reader moments. I never urge others to disregard my opinion but I sort of do in this case.

4 stars

I don't read poetry often, but was drawn to this collection. Jericho's writing is so beautiful that I even enjoyed reading the poems that I could not resonate with.

A very powerful award winning collection of poetry that looks deeply into race, death and relationships. I can certainly see why the book received all the acclaim that it did. Some of my particular favorites are "Dark" a deeply personal self examination of the author himself, "Token" an insightful look into the differences between small towns and large cities and "Good White People" an unapologetic look at race .A wonderful collection from start to finish which you can reread and savor again and again.

I've been putting off this review because I don't know what to say about this collection other than it felt grounded in particular scenes and imagery, a specificity that also carried mythological weight.

● poetry collection
● different and new, invented style of poetry writing (i love this)

Brown's new collection, which won the Pulitzer for poetry, is easy to read but difficult to comprehend. I enjoyed reading it; I'm confident that I missed a lot. His subjects include the difficulties of living as a Black man, relationships with other men, fathers and sons. He does not use complex structures, although his Duplex form stands out. He left me with some evocative images and a desire to read more of this sort of thing.

You can read it like dreaming.

In this collection of poetry Brown focuses on his identity and experiences as a gay black American son and man. And though I can recognize some or all of these themes in most-to-all of the poems, most of them are more literary than I can understand or appreciate. He uses form and structure to emphasize his meanings in ways I can't interpret, other than to know I am missing the point.

That's not to say there aren't some poems here that I liked. The ones that stood out for me:
The Tradition
Foreday in the Morning
Token
Duplex: Cento (the last in the book, which may be my favorite)

He uses flowers, plants, and the natural world a lot in these poems, placing humans into the natural world--and clearly people are part of nature.

I read Brown's first book soon after finishing his sophomore collection, The New Testament. While this isn't quite as strong as its follow-up, it still interrogates themes of blackness, and masculinity, gender, and male love with poems that deliver powerful images and inventive wordplay. With each book, Brown digs deeper and more fearlessly into notions of identity. Start here, and if you like even just a little what you read, you will be blown away by the second book. I wait with bated breath for his third collection.

Jericho Brown's second collection employs its titular motif in surprising and affecting ways, weaved through a challenging introspection of identity and self that shows how black men, gay black men, are quite aptly crucified by their society. Everything I say about this book seems petty. Let me not mislead you that is a book of political diatribes, or queer poetry, or neo-confessional verse. It is in part all of these things and none of them. Staggering lines attest to this: "We wrote our own Bible / and got thrown out of church" or "We saw police pull sharks out of the water just to watch them breathe" or "Nothing we erect is our own." This is one of the most powerful collections of contemporary poems that I have had the joy of reading.½