JERICHO RISING

It’s 9:00 p.m. and the poet Jericho Brown is singing Whitney Houston in a crowded bistro.

“Ohhhhh, I wanna dance with somebody,” he croons. “I wanna feel the heat!” Brown grins, shimmies in his seat, takes a messy bite of his hamburger. Asked if he watched the recent Houston documentary, he nods.

“Yes, God, and I cried the whole time. I was like, how did she not have anybody?” Brown swallows, takes a long swig of water. “There is not a day that I don’t talk to a poet,” he says. “This is what I mean when I say I don’t feel lonely anymore.”

Poems by Brown, who at forty-three years old is the director of the creative writing program at Atlanta’s Emory University, have been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Time magazine, among other prestigious spots. His third collection, The Tradition, has received rapturous praise—the book was already in its second printing shortly after its debut—and was named a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for poetry, and one of the year’s “Books All Georgians Should Read” by the Georgia Center for the Book.

The poet and playwright Claudia Rankine says that to read Brown’s work is to “encounter devastating genius.” And indeed, his poems are sly buds that bloom on the page, bouquets of rage, wit, sorrow, lust, and earned wisdom. “Jericho is sui generis,” says Ilya Kaminsky, himself a celebrated Atlanta-based poet with a long list of accolades to his credit.

Kaminsky recalls being introduced to Brown in a tiny apartment in California. The two now talk every week, often touring together on the literary superstar circuit. “I have met many talented writers, some very famous,” Kaminsky says. “But one can tell right away when a person is an original, an individual. There are maybe four or five poets is more talented.”