The New Testament
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius' Claudia Rankine
Jericho Brown's The New Testament is a devastating meditation on race, sexuality and contemporary American society by one of the most important new voices in US poetry. In poems of immense clarity, lyricism and skill, Brown shows us a world where disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighbourhood, and trauma runs through generations. Here Brown makes brilliant and subversive use of Bible stories to address the gay experience from both a personal and a political perspective. By refusing to sacrifice nuance, no matter how charged and urgent his subject, Brown is one of the handful of contemporary poets who have found a speech adequate to the complex times in which we live, and a way to express an equivocal hope for the future.
The New Testament was winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, 2015.
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.
