The Tradition

"Bullet Points" by Jericho Brown (2019)

Like “The Tradition,” “Bullet Points” addresses the murders of Black people at the hands of the police; and like “The Tradition,” this poem is also included in Brown’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection. While “The Tradition” employs the first-person plural, “Bullet Points” employs the first-person singular.

"Duplex" by Jericho Brown (2019)

While “The Tradition” is written in a traditional poetic form (the sonnet), Jericho Brown has also invented new forms of his own. One such form, the duplex, is composed of repetitive couplets; the first line of each couplet repeats the last line of the previous couplet, and the last line of the poem repeats the first line of the poem. Brown’s book The Tradition (which contains the poem of the same name) has a duplex poem in each of its four sections—the final section contains three duplexes. This poem, “Duplex,” is the first example of the form in the book.

The Tradition by Jericho Brown (2019)

The poem’s eponymous full-length collection (published in 2019) won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The prize committee describes The Tradition as “a collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence” (“