Jericho Brown's The Tradition is sexy, mournful, playful, full of love and tricks. It fuses joy and agony, gravity and humor.

The book includes several of Brown's "duplex" poems. In a duplex poem, each line basically repeats the previous line (sometimes with variation in the words and structure). He then juxtaposes the repeated line with a fresh image in the subsequent line, which is repeated in one form or another, and so on. Here's an example:

A poem is a gesture toward home.
It makes dark demands I call my own.

                Memory makes demands darker than my own:
                My last love drove a burgundy car. 

My first love drove a burgundy car. 
He was fast and awful, tall as my father.

                Steadfast and awful, my tall father
                Hit hard as a hailstorm. He'd leave marks. 

Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark
Like the sound of a mother weeping again.

                Like the sound of my mother weeping again,
                No sound beating ends where it began. 

None of the beaten end up how we began. 
A poem is a gesture toward home. 

A duplex poem generates a sense of movement, surprise, and poignance. Each line echoes a previous line but also progresses toward something new.

Brown has named this volume The Tradition, rather than simply Tradition. What's the difference? The definite article suggests a singular, specific tradition—one that can't encompass any universal human experience of the past the way the word "tradition" attempts to do when it stands alone. Although in interviews Brown frequently laments being pidgeonholed as a "Black poet" (rightly so), I can't help but read the title through the lens of identity: the Black lyric tradition and the gay lyric tradition. Within these traditions, Brown writes much about domestic life and the experience of public identity within private lives. "A poem is a gesture toward home," and this book is Brown's invitation to us into his beautiful home.