The Tradition
by Jericho Brown
Summary
The Tradition confronts anti Black violence, queer desire, illness, and inherited trauma directly, insisting throughout that tenderness itself can function as a form of resistance rather than a retreat from harder subjects. Jericho Brown's third collection builds its argument as much through form as through statement, most distinctly through the duplex, a form Brown invented that hybridizes the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues into a single recursive structure whose lines repeat and shift the way memory and history repeat and shift across a life. Brown builds the collection so that its most technically inventive poems and its most direct, plainly stated ones carry equal weight, refusing to treat formal ambition and emotional directness as opposing choices.
The duplex form works by taking a line from one couplet and reusing it, slightly altered, to open the next, so that the poem's structure literally enacts the way violence and history loop back on the body rather than staying safely in the past. Brown uses that same recursive logic across poems that are not written as duplexes as well, braiding public urgency, police violence, an epidemic, the news itself, together with private feeling into a tightly wrought, musical whole.
Reading The Tradition means encountering poems built to hold pain and tenderness in the same breath without letting either cancel the other out. It suits a reader interested in formal invention put directly to political and personal use, a book that treats a newly invented poetic form not as a technical exercise but as the only shape capable of holding what it needs to say.
Historical Context & Significance
The Tradition won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; that year's finalists were Dorianne Laux's Only as the Day Is Long and Mary Ruefle's Dunce. The collection had already been a finalist for both the National Book Award for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019, so the Pulitzer arrived as the last and largest in a run of major nominations for the same book.
Brown was born Nelson Demery III in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1976, and worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before completing his MFA at the University of New Orleans and a doctorate at the University of Houston. He directs the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta, and his honors include a 2009 Whiting Award, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, a career trajectory that placed The Tradition at its exact midpoint rather than its end.