Please
By Jericho Brown
Winner of the 2009 American Book Award
“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
“Jericho Brown’s
debut collection Please resonates like aftershocks on a fault line.
The poems here are hauntingly the consequence of lives lived. The silent
terror in these poems is the future they seem to inform despite the attempts
to integrate the incoherent with the coherent moments of lived experience.
Please continually repositions its readers inside the violence
of the interruption, the psychic break. To read these poems is to encounter
the devastating genius of Jericho Brown: ‘If I had known the location
of my own runaway / Breath, I too would have found a blues.’”
—Claudia Rankine
"Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry: a book in which moral and cultural relativism does not form the pillars of its foundation."
—Virginia Konchan, Rain Taxi Review of Books
"Brown is particularly adept at exposing the duplicity inherent in both experience and language. In fact, the double-entendre of the collection’s title sets the stage for what’s to come since one might utter the word 'Please' in either a begging or a dismissive manner."
—Wayne Johns, NewPages.com
"The poems in Jericho Brown's Please hit you right away and make you say, 'Wow,' make you pause, make you close the book to take a break to recuperate from the blow. Please is a strong book of poems — strong like a man's fist, strong like love, strong like music."
—Melissa McEwen, Immunization Against Invisibility
"Just read this book. Seriously. Everybody should be reading Jericho Brown."
—Weston Cutter, Corduroybooks.com
"Brown is able to seamlessly place music icons into a constellation of his own family members and lovers: a mother who goes back to her abusive husband, a homeless gay teenager, a father who prefers to speak with the back of his hand. These voices are united by a menace that can never be fully exorcised, only recognized and sung about."
—Saeed Jones, Barrelhouse
New
Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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