The New York Times Reviews Jericho Brown's The Tradition

Maya Phillips reviews Jericho Brown's third collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon, 2019), for the New York Times. "Every relationship is a study in proximities," writes Phillips. An excerpt from this review:

...[It's] Brown’s invented form, the “duplex,” a 14-line poem of staggered couplets that’s part pantoum, part sonnet and part ghazal, that showcases his particular strengths, in linking phrases and images, repeating words in a kind of transactional exchange of distance between the speaker and the reader; the repetition invites us forward only to push us slightly backward, a rhetorical push-pull that lands us back at the line where we started. In this sense, Brown’s poems are flirtatious, teasing us with moments of sexual and emotional vulnerability. “Though the spring be less than actual, / Men roam shirtless as if none ever hurt me,” he hints in one of his more riveting duplex poems, and a few pages later, he admits, “I’d oblige because he hurt me / With a violence I mistook for desire.”

Brown’s speaker also reveals himself in the exquisitely executed “Layover,” an account of an assault alluded to throughout the collection. A stripped-down stream-of-consciousness account that rolls down the page without interruption by punctuation, the poem reads like a long pant, fast and yet halting, due to the sharp enjambment. The scene isn’t performed or dressed up in metaphor, but rather delivered with the small, specific details that make a story come devastatingly to life...

Read on at the NYT.