The New Testament

Honored as a "Best Book of 2014" by *Library Journal*

NPR.org writes: In his second collection, The New Testament, 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. And not everyone has the chutzpah to rewrite The Good Book. NPR.org

"Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry." Rain Taxi

"To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius." Claudia Rankine

In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest thing and the truth is coming on fast.

Fairy Tale

Say the shame I see inching like steam

Along the streets will never seep

Beneath the doors of this bedroom,

And if it does, if we dare to breathe,

Tell me that though the world ends us,

Lover, it cannot end our love

Of narrative. Don t you have a story

For me? like the one you tell

With fingers over my lips to keep me

From sighing when before the queen

Is kidnapped the prince bows

To the enemy, handing over the horn

Of his favorite unicorn like those men

Brought, bought, and whipped until

They accepted their masters names.

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award. He currently teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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