Jericho Brown

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.… (more)

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.
… (more)