Jericho Brown has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry. Brown holds a PhD from the University of Houston, an MFA from the University of New Orleans, and a BA from Dillard University. His first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), was named one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta and poetry editor at The Believer.
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PleasePoemsFrom"Scarecrow"
IV. On Graduate School
Grass for acres and trees tall,
Then, everywhere there should be
Some harvest to guard, sprouts
A building in which I am mistaken
For a broom, handled as such,
And given to the floor. To dust.
I am here to learn: that which fears me
Must be crow
In this hall of heavy doors
Where my body is a blemish.
Please:Poems -
PleasePoemsFrom"Beneath Me"
They were of a different hue.
They were all the same color.
The roaches at 51 Felton Street
Went to work when we snored.
They raced for black lines
At the flick of a switch.
They were an athletic sort.
Please:Poems -
PleasePoemsFrom"Like Father"
My father’s embrace is tighter
Now that he knows
He is not the only man in my life.
He whispers, Remember when, and, I love you,
As he holds my hand hungry
For a discussion of Bible scriptures
Over breakfast. He pours cups of coffee
I can’t stop
Spilling.
Please:Poems
"In his second collection, 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." —NPR [on The New Testament]
"Everyone sings in this live-wire, passionate book, in which the poet ventriloquizes a cast of characters’ hurt into music: Janis Joplin, the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, Diana Ross, a field of crickets. What these songs hold in common is a commitment to examining how love lives beside the wound, how tenderness and harm are so close together, for these battered singers, that it’s often hard to tell them apart. Fresh, deeply felt, formally adventurous, Please is a stunning debut." —Mark Doty
"Please is saturated with an artful passion that gives fire to Jericho Brown’s elegies and pathos to his odes. This is the poetry of blood-ship: the meaning of family, of love, of sexuality; the resonances of pain and the possibilities of redemption. No wonder there are so many people naming and being named here. No wonder Jericho Brown and his divas and misfits, his tricksters and innocents call out and answer to ‘a please that sounds like music.’ Intimate, honest, immediate—I could never say all I love about this book . . .” —Terrance Hayes
