The New Testament
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Confident and sensitive, Brown's follow-up to his American Book Award-winning debut, PLEASE, signals his growing stature in the poetry world. He forms this collection around Biblical language and motifs, reworking them through the materiality and culture of modern America with particular sensitivity to gender, sexuality, and race. It's an audacious move in all its entanglements, but as brothers and lovers and gods resonate through one another, lines such as "I found myself bound to Him and bound to His/ Bidding" become full-bodied and evocative. While decidedly and beautifully political at times (in reverence and irreverence alike) Brown's grounding in biographical details and his hard-won investigation of love's powers emerge as powerfully as the surface themes. As the poem "Nativity" declares, "Lord, let even me/ And what the saints say is sin within/ My blood, which certainly shall see/ Death see to it I mean / Let that sting/ Last and be transfigured." Brown is a poet of sure technique, even as an occasional line, such as the declaration "To believe in God is to love/ What none can see," falls flat in comparison to the collection's tender music. Lyric and sturdy, however, these poems earn consistent attention as they redefine survival in a wounded world.
