The Tradition

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021 "By some literary magic—no, it's precision, and honesty—Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."—Craig Morgan Teicher, “'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview” for NPR “A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem.“—Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown’s “Dark” (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019) “Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men.”—O, The Oprah Magazine Named a Lit Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2019” One of Buzzfeed’s “66 Books Coming in 2019 You’ll Want to Keep Your Eyes On” The Rumpus poetry pick for “What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner” One of BookRiot’s “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019” Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

"A special publication of University of Calgary Press."

Shaw Sebring is sixteen and trying desperately to understand and accept his father's recent suicide. Moving with his mother halfway across the county in an effort to distance themselves from the awful truth, Shaw lands in a new school and finds that the ghost of his father, a best-selling author, has followed him. Determined that he will not follow in his father's footsteps Shaw tries to chart his own course, until circumstances force him to accept that where--and who--we come from have an impact on what we become.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

Honored as a "Best Book of 2014" by Library Journal NPR.org writes: “In his second collection, The New Testament, Brown treats disease and love and lust between men, with a gentle touch, returning again and again to the stories of the Bible, which confirm or dispute his vision of real life. 'Every last word is contagious,' he writes, awake to all the implications of that phrase. There is plenty of guilt—survivor’s guilt, sinner’s guilt—and ever-present death, but also the joy of survival and sin. And not everyone has the chutzpah to rewrite The Good Book.”—NPR.org "Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry."—Rain Taxi "To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius."—Claudia Rankine In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest thing—and the truth is coming on fast. Fairy Tale Say the shame I see inching like steam Along the streets will never seep Beneath the doors of this bedroom, And if it does, if we dare to breathe, Tell me that though the world ends us, Lover, it cannot end our love Of narrative. Don’t you have a story For me?—like the one you tell With fingers over my lips to keep me From sighing when—before the queen Is kidnapped—the prince bows To the enemy, handing over the horn Of his favorite unicorn like those men Brought, bought, and whipped until They accepted their masters’ names. Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award. He currently teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

This book explores examples of this process of invention and addresses the complex interaction of past and present in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism.

Written in the twelfth century, the Naisadhiyacarita (The Adventures of Nala, King of Nisadha) is a seminal Sanskrit poem beloved by South Asian literary communities for nearly a millennium. This volume introduces readers to the poem’s author, his reading communities, the modes through which the poem has been read and used, the contexts through which it became canonical, its literary offspring, and the emotional power it still holds for the culture that values it. The study privileges the intellectual, affective, and social forms of cultural practice informing a region’s people and institutions. It treats literary texts as traditions in their own right and draws attention to the critical genres and actors involved in their reception.

Interrogating the Tradition interprets figures in the history of Western thought from a broad, "continental" perspective. Divided into three major sections—hermeneutical thought, Heidegger and the Greeks, and the question of nature in German Idealism—the question of origins is central throughout and takes various shapes, all within the context of the history of Western philosophy. Addressed are the form inquiries take into manners by which we receive our philosophical tradition, the originary force of Plato and Aristotle in the formation of philosophical interpretations of time and human life, and inceptional concepts of nature in the nineteenth century. The philosophers treated here are primarily ancient Greek and nineteenth-century German, but also included are careful discussions of Heidegger and Gadamer. Coming from both sides of the Atlantic and representing various approaches to the issues, the contributors showcase their work on one of the major cutting edges of philosophy. Contributors to this book include Robert Bernasconi, Walter Brogan, Tina Chanter, Françoise Dastur, John Ellis, Günter Figal, Rodolphe Gasché, Jean Grondin, David Farrell Krell, Michael Naas, James Risser, John Russon, John Sallis, Charles E. Scott, Ben Vedder, and Jason M. Wirth.