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19 pages 38 minutes read

Jericho Brown

Bullet Points

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2019

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

The Tradition” by Jericho Brown (2019)

Originally published on Poem-A-Day in 2015, the titular poem of Brown’s third collection also alludes to police violence toward Black men. The poem mourns that economic viability or advanced education does little to protect Black people from daily racial bias. The speaker is a gardener, but despite having “filmed what we / Planted for proof we existed” (Lines 9-11), there is nothing he can do “[w]here the world ends, everything cut down” (Line 13). The last line connects victims of police brutality—“John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown” (Line 14)—with the short-blooming flowers.

Duplex” by Jericho Brown (2019)

“Duplex” appears directly after “Bullet Points” in the first section of The Tradition. It compares the writing of a poem to “a gesture toward home” (Lines 1, 14) and explores the speaker’s childhood abandonment and violence. The speaker’s father “hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks” (Line 8) on the speaker’s psyche. The duplex is a literary form invented by Brown for the collection, borrowing from blues syncopation and traditional repetitive poetic forms like the villanelle, pantoum, and ghazel. Brown’s description of the process of inventing the duplex can be found in his essay “Invention.”

Aerial View” by Jericho Brown (2024)

Published in The New Yorker, this poem fits in with Brown’s concerns about preconceived perceptions. The speaker suggests:

People who romanticize an Africa
They’ve never seen
Like to identify themselves
With lions (Lines 1-4).

This shows that they are attracted to the animals’ beauty and aggression. However, the speaker’s own experience as a gay man is different; he identifies with the “giraffe” (Line 9), whose remarkable strength, power, and ability to “eat greens of every variety” (Line 20) means it isn’t locked into any preconceived stereotype. Like “Bullet Points,” the poem highlights individual dignity, with the speaker insisting, “Just one of me / Is a parade” (Lines 33-34).

Further Literary Resources

Bullet Points by Jericho Brown” by Sian Cain (2020)

This article features the poem and some commentary from Cain about how Brown’s “elegiac poems mourn all that is denied black men, and also what is inflicted on them.” Cain considers Brown’s varied subject matter, noting how the poet finds that “transcendent joy, sensuousness and peace can all still be found within black bodies.” This article also links to an article Brown authored, “To win justice for George Floyd, we need the rage that abolished slavery,” which discusses the death of George Floyd and the history of racial injustice.

In this interview for CBC Radio, Wachtel spoke with Brown about the inspiration for “Bullet Points”: the deaths of Sandra Bland, Victor White III, and Jesus Huerta. Brown talks about racism in the US, the death of George Floyd, and how police bias and brutality have personally affected him: Brown recalls:

I’ve had police follow me into my own front yard. I've had police throw me onto the hood of my car. I wasn't doing anything when any of those things happened. These things happening to me, that's not special. That happens to Black people in this nation every day.

Jericho Rising” by Alison Glock (2020)

In this long-form feature on Brown for Garden & Gun shortly before he won the Pulitzer Prize, Glock focuses on what shapes him as a poet, his process, and his sense of community. Glock covers Brown’s religious upbringing, his relationship with his parents, his queer identity, and how he came to poetry, noting influences like Sylvia Plath, A. E. Housman, Frederick Douglass, and Essex Hemphill. Glock also spends time discussing craft and Brown unusual techniques, such as keeping lines in themed Ziploc bags that he draws from at random. In the interview, Brown discusses being a Southern man, and Southern history and culture.

This article appeared in Houstonia as publicity for a reading from The Tradition at his alma mater, the University of Houston. The reading took place “the day after Derek Chauvin’s [guilty] verdict” for the murder of George Floyd. Brown talks about his own racial profiling by a Louisiana officer, while noting that his work is broader than just poems about race: “I believe that we’re capable of holding more than one thing in our hands at a time.”

Becoming Jericho Brown” by Jeremy Redmon (2016)

This long-form article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution spends a lot of time on Brown’s upbringing, his spirituality, and how his parents differ in their memories of the domestic violence Brown experienced. Redmon interviews Nequella, Brown’s sister, who agrees with her brother’s version of past events. Redmon also spends a good deal of time explaining how a dream led Brown to change his name from Nelson Demery, and covers Brown’s need to take ownership of his poems and of the fact that he is gay. Redmon also mentions “Bullet Points” and its connection to Sandra Bland.

Listen to Poem

In this video, Brown recites his poem while sitting outside on a stoop, near some red flowers—a deliberate contrast to the violence in the poem. The poet’s inflection deliberately highlights the poem’s line breaks. This recording was made to help promote the “Civic Dialogue Edition” of The Tradition by Copper Canyon Press (2021).

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