Jericho Brown

Duplex: Cento

langue: anglais
traductions: allemand (Duplex: Cento)

Duplex: Cento

My last love drove a burgundy car,
Color of a rash, a symptom of sickness.

We were the symptoms, the road our sickness:
None of our fights ended where they began.

None of the beaten end where they begin.
Any man in love can cause a messy corpse,

But I didn’t want to leave a messy corpse
Obliterated in some lilied field,

Stench obliterating lilies of the field,
The murderer, young and unreasonable.

He was so young, so unreasonable,
Steadfast and awful, tall as my father.

Steadfast and awful, my tall father
Was my first love.  He drove a burgundy car. 

Jericho Brown

Foto © Dirk Skiba
* 14.04.1976, Shreveport, LA, États-Unis
Réside à: Atlanta, GA, États-Unis
In his latest collection of poems, The Tradition (2019), Jericho Brown, who grew up in Louisiana, writes about the ambivalence of living in a country characterised by mass shootings and violent attacks on unarmed people by the police. In his poems, the body forms a place of refuge for living and surviving. At the heart of The New Testament (2014) Brown looks at what it is like living in the USA today as a black gay man. The collection won him the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was listed by the Library Journal, Coldfront and the Academy of American Poets as one of the best books of the year. His first collection of poems, Please, won the American Book Award in 2009.

Foto © Dirk Skiba
Jericho Brown has won the Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts.

His work has appeared in such places as Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time and The Pushart Prize Anthology, as well as being included in several volumes of the anthology series The Best American Poetry. He teaches at Emory University in Atlanta as an Associate Professor and Head of the Creative Writing Program.

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