Inhalt: Ganymede -- As a human being -- Flower -- The microscopes -- The tradition -- Hero -- After another country -- The water lilies -- Foreday in the morning -- The card tables -- Bullet points -- Duplex -- The trees -- Second language -- After Avery R. Young -- A young man -- Duplex -- Riddle -- Good white people -- Correspondence -- Trojan -- The legend of big and fine -- The peaches -- Night shift -- Shovel -- The long way -- Dear whiteness -- Of the swan -- Entertainment industry -- Stake -- Layover -- Duplex -- Of my fury -- After Essex Hemphill -- Stay -- A.D. -- Turn you over -- The virus -- The rabbits -- Monotheism -- Token -- The hammers -- I know what I love -- Crossing -- Deliverance -- Meditations at the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park -- Dark -- Duplex -- Thighs and ass -- Cakewalk -- Stand -- Duplex: cento. "Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown;s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction."--Goodreads.com