The New Testament by Jericho Brown
A Review by Kendra DeColo, Book Review Editor
The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), Jericho Brown’s second poetry collection, is a solemn and deeply affecting follow-up to his debut Please (New Issues, 2010). Whereas Please might be defined by the vibrant language of persona and performance, The New Testament is governed by vulnerability: the ways in which we reveal ourselves and how we are seen. Set against personal and political landscapes, the collection moves throughout the speaker’s history and relationships, framed by a distinctly American narrative of loneliness, heartache, and betrayal. The poems explore family, love, and illness while opening up to the political and universal— revealing the myriad of ways we hurt one another.
Throughout its three sections, The New Testament interrogates and complicates what it means to love, trust, and forge an autonomous self in the context of religion and politics. The Bible serves as a theoretical and formal framework against which the speaker reinvents and questions his beliefs. Similarly, the United States is a character as well as backdrop, its dysfunction and heartache manifested at the level of personal relationships and myth-making. Poems like “The Ten Commandments” and “Homeland” lie next to each other, referencing and subverting the tropes of political and dogmatic language. The question at the heart of this premise seems to be: what does it mean to live with decency—to be a steward and brother— in a context which deprives us of our humanity?
The answer is found in the details of daily life—how we respond and choose to define ourselves in the moment. Each poem serves a reminder and reckoning that it is impossible to make it out of this life unscathed. The first poem “Colosseum,” reads like a preface to the story about to unfold:
I cannot locate the origin
Of slaughter, but I know
How my own feels, that I live with it
And sometimes use it
To get the living done…
In this poem, “the origin of slaughter” can speak to so many of the collections’ elements, echoing historical bloodshed, illness, and family tragedy. The short and heavily enjambed lines also echo the style of biblical verse and dramatic monologue, heightened by the capitalized first word of each line. In their form and syntax, Brown’s poems are honed down to their essence, elegant, visceral, and prismatic, each line reflecting multiple narrative threads.
Many of the poems feel steeped in the loneliness of prayer and reflection, creating a lyricism that is spiritual and of the body. In “Romans 12:1” he writes:
Hear me coming
And they cross their legs. As men
Are wont to hate women,
As women are taught to hate
Themselves, they hate a woman
They smell in me.
The voice is intimate and public, carrying the cadences and repetition of biblical verse. In “Labor,” a poem which reminisces about mowing lawns for old women, he writes, “The loneliest people have only the earth to love/ And not one friend their own age.” Here we can see the loneliness of the speaker, and the disconnect between himself and the women he called old “Because they wouldn’t move out of their chair/ Without my help,” revealing how we can feel alone and trapped by our own projections onto others.
At times the tone of The New Testament feels less personal and more philosophical, such as in “Interrogation,” in which abstraction and rhetoric accrue as if to mirror an identity reduced to labels and tropes:
In that world, I was a black man.
Now, the bridge burns and I
Leaves behind.
The interrogative and hypothetical modes could create a feeling of disconnection, however Brown grounds the political, collective narrative with physical details, as in “VI. Multiple-Choice”:
Metal makes for a chemical reaction.
Now that my wrists are cuffed, I am
Not like a citizen. What touches me
Claims contamination. What
A shame, A sham. When the police come
They come in steel boots. Precious
Metal. They want me kicked,
So kicked me they do…
The political is always personal and tragedies are never distant or removed, even when they happen to someone else or faraway.
In “The Rest We Deserve,” the experience of loneliness is further complicated as the speaker listens to his homophobic neighbor sing to his child, while confronting his conflicting reactions: “I don’t know why it bothers me./ I don’t need him to love me the way he loves that child” and then, “I want/ To hurt him, and I want to help.” By the end of the poem, the speaker’s loneliness transforms into a larger, collective experience: “everyone wishing any voice in this/ Building could sing for the thing growing in the smallest/ Of us when we open our mouths at odd hours to shriek?” The lines in this poem are longer than many in the collection, as if allowing space for these contradictions to coexist.
The collection is as much about love, romantic and familial, as it is about loss—how they are always informing one another. Many of the elegies are love poems, such as in “Obituary”:
When you measure the distance
Between this grave and what I gave, you’ll find me
Here, at the end of my body and in love
With Derrick Franklin, gift of carnelian,
lashes thick as a thumb.
The elegies are also self-portraits, such as “Motherland,” a devastating sequence about the brother’s death and the woman, Angel, who killed him. It weaves together memories of the speaker’s mother, last moments shared with the brother, and a tangent about a Teddy Pendergrass concert:
Someone who desires any
Worn piece of man must be
Willing to shoot or be shot.
While the poem circles and returns to the brother and his final words, “like it was his last chance at giving/ advice” the final section ends with the speaker questioning his own desire, moving beyond grief to access a sense of timelessness where the speaker sees himself in the eyes of his family.
In an interview, Brown said that the love poem is always political. In this last section, the political and personal not only merge but they ascend into another pitch, still lit with the cadences of scripture but more bodily and sensual, as if resolving the distance between worship and praise. The tone is somber and celebratory, love transformed into a transgressive and political act in the face of mortality. In “Psalm 150,” he writes:
…My man and I hold
Our breaths, certain we can stop time or maybe
Eliminate it from our lives, which are shorter
Since we learned to make love for each other
Rather than doing it to each other.
Revelation and transcendence are at work in every line to “Let that sting/ Last and be transfigured.” At times the sensual can border on melodramatic, specifically in poems in which the enjambment is more predictable than surprising, as in “What the Holy Do”:
He turned
His final face to the camera
Like a teenager coming
Upon a pimple in the mirror.
However, the relentlessness of line breaks and lyricism is balanced with tonal and syntactical diminuendos, allowing us space to feel each word. The collection is stripped down to what is most necessary, forging a voice that stands, unguarded, bravely and soberly choosing to believe, worship, and love, knowing all that is at stake:
Because I am what gladiators call
A man in love—love
Being any reminder we survived.
Throughout its three sections, The New Testament interrogates and complicates what it means to love, trust, and forge an autonomous self in the context of religion and politics. The Bible serves as a theoretical and formal framework against which the speaker reinvents and questions his beliefs. Similarly, the United States is a character as well as backdrop, its dysfunction and heartache manifested at the level of personal relationships and myth-making. Poems like “The Ten Commandments” and “Homeland” lie next to each other, referencing and subverting the tropes of political and dogmatic language. The question at the heart of this premise seems to be: what does it mean to live with decency—to be a steward and brother— in a context which deprives us of our humanity?
The answer is found in the details of daily life—how we respond and choose to define ourselves in the moment. Each poem serves a reminder and reckoning that it is impossible to make it out of this life unscathed. The first poem “Colosseum,” reads like a preface to the story about to unfold:
I cannot locate the origin
Of slaughter, but I know
How my own feels, that I live with it
And sometimes use it
To get the living done…
In this poem, “the origin of slaughter” can speak to so many of the collections’ elements, echoing historical bloodshed, illness, and family tragedy. The short and heavily enjambed lines also echo the style of biblical verse and dramatic monologue, heightened by the capitalized first word of each line. In their form and syntax, Brown’s poems are honed down to their essence, elegant, visceral, and prismatic, each line reflecting multiple narrative threads.
Many of the poems feel steeped in the loneliness of prayer and reflection, creating a lyricism that is spiritual and of the body. In “Romans 12:1” he writes:
Hear me coming
And they cross their legs. As men
Are wont to hate women,
As women are taught to hate
Themselves, they hate a woman
They smell in me.
The voice is intimate and public, carrying the cadences and repetition of biblical verse. In “Labor,” a poem which reminisces about mowing lawns for old women, he writes, “The loneliest people have only the earth to love/ And not one friend their own age.” Here we can see the loneliness of the speaker, and the disconnect between himself and the women he called old “Because they wouldn’t move out of their chair/ Without my help,” revealing how we can feel alone and trapped by our own projections onto others.
At times the tone of The New Testament feels less personal and more philosophical, such as in “Interrogation,” in which abstraction and rhetoric accrue as if to mirror an identity reduced to labels and tropes:
In that world, I was a black man.
Now, the bridge burns and I
Leaves behind.
The interrogative and hypothetical modes could create a feeling of disconnection, however Brown grounds the political, collective narrative with physical details, as in “VI. Multiple-Choice”:
Metal makes for a chemical reaction.
Now that my wrists are cuffed, I am
Not like a citizen. What touches me
Claims contamination. What
A shame, A sham. When the police come
They come in steel boots. Precious
Metal. They want me kicked,
So kicked me they do…
The political is always personal and tragedies are never distant or removed, even when they happen to someone else or faraway.
In “The Rest We Deserve,” the experience of loneliness is further complicated as the speaker listens to his homophobic neighbor sing to his child, while confronting his conflicting reactions: “I don’t know why it bothers me./ I don’t need him to love me the way he loves that child” and then, “I want/ To hurt him, and I want to help.” By the end of the poem, the speaker’s loneliness transforms into a larger, collective experience: “everyone wishing any voice in this/ Building could sing for the thing growing in the smallest/ Of us when we open our mouths at odd hours to shriek?” The lines in this poem are longer than many in the collection, as if allowing space for these contradictions to coexist.
The collection is as much about love, romantic and familial, as it is about loss—how they are always informing one another. Many of the elegies are love poems, such as in “Obituary”:
When you measure the distance
Between this grave and what I gave, you’ll find me
Here, at the end of my body and in love
With Derrick Franklin, gift of carnelian,
lashes thick as a thumb.
The elegies are also self-portraits, such as “Motherland,” a devastating sequence about the brother’s death and the woman, Angel, who killed him. It weaves together memories of the speaker’s mother, last moments shared with the brother, and a tangent about a Teddy Pendergrass concert:
Someone who desires any
Worn piece of man must be
Willing to shoot or be shot.
While the poem circles and returns to the brother and his final words, “like it was his last chance at giving/ advice” the final section ends with the speaker questioning his own desire, moving beyond grief to access a sense of timelessness where the speaker sees himself in the eyes of his family.
In an interview, Brown said that the love poem is always political. In this last section, the political and personal not only merge but they ascend into another pitch, still lit with the cadences of scripture but more bodily and sensual, as if resolving the distance between worship and praise. The tone is somber and celebratory, love transformed into a transgressive and political act in the face of mortality. In “Psalm 150,” he writes:
…My man and I hold
Our breaths, certain we can stop time or maybe
Eliminate it from our lives, which are shorter
Since we learned to make love for each other
Rather than doing it to each other.
Revelation and transcendence are at work in every line to “Let that sting/ Last and be transfigured.” At times the sensual can border on melodramatic, specifically in poems in which the enjambment is more predictable than surprising, as in “What the Holy Do”:
He turned
His final face to the camera
Like a teenager coming
Upon a pimple in the mirror.
However, the relentlessness of line breaks and lyricism is balanced with tonal and syntactical diminuendos, allowing us space to feel each word. The collection is stripped down to what is most necessary, forging a voice that stands, unguarded, bravely and soberly choosing to believe, worship, and love, knowing all that is at stake:
Because I am what gladiators call
A man in love—love
Being any reminder we survived.