"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