Bullet Points

“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 “