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.
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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. ( )

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.
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