A review of Jericho Brown’s THE NEW TESTAMENT

The cover of Jericho Brown’s second book, The New Testament, is a painting of two half-naked Black men. The standing man is caring for the seated one, shaving him, while the seated man presses his head into the other’s groin. It’s sensual, connected, natural. The juxtaposition of the title and image tells us so much about this work we are about to enter, a world where the Black gay male body is at the center of the sacred.

To appreciate The New Testament, Brown asks the reader to bring some background knowledge. Or with a little research, it’s pretty easy to figure out the title “Romans 12:1” refers this passage, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” So, worship is offering your body, which makes the violent sexual lines “I let a man touch me until I bled, / Until my blood met his hunger” (6) resonant with the holy. I appreciate that Brown’s poems on sex are not simplistic or sanitized as a speaker says in “Heart Condition,” “I don’t want to hurt a man, but I like to hear one beg” (68). But also in a homophobic racist society, this sexual connection is a sanctuary. In “Psalm 150” a speaker says:

                                                            Dear Lord,

Let me watch for his arrival and hang my head

And shake it like a man who’s lost and lived.

Something keeps trying, but I’m not killed yet. (54)

Brown creates a nice tension with the stanza break. He makes us sit with the connotations of “hang my head”—penitent, ashamed—before literally shaking it off with the joy of survival. In many of these poems, Brown is not just in conversation with The New Testament but the whole lineage of Black poets and artists in America like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. In this poem’s last line, Brown holds hands with Lucille Clifton’s line: “come celebrate with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed,” including himself in a lineage of joyful survival. I once heard Brown say he thinks of himself as 100% gay, 100% Black, 100% Southern. He celebrates the survival of all those identities.

            But this is also a book full of violence and death. Four poems are titled “Another Elegy.” In many works, Brown circles the story of a brother’s death at the hands his wife, Angel, whom the brother physically and emotionally abused. We hear this story in the first, second, and third person; we hear it as a short story complete with setting and dialogue; a myth; even completely undercut—“My brother is a metaphor” says a poetry professor to his students (“Make Believe,” 61). In “Another Elegy” that begins “Expect death,” the facts and the tone are ominous:

Whether or not

You are clean, you arrive late

Because you don’t believe her

When, sobbing, as usual, she

Calls to say if you don’t stop

Your brother, she will kill him

This time. (8)

The use of second person implies it’s not just the violent protagonists that are at fault, but the speaker and the reader as well. “You” the singular and “you” the collective are also culpable.

I am constantly in awe of Brown’s craft, particularly line breaks that create tension and surprise like “Calls to say if you don’t stop / Your brother.” This break changes the meaning of the sentence. Who needs to stop, the one getting the phone call or the brother? The line break makes it both.

Brown also beautifully combines lyric with narrative. “Another Elegy” (p. 8) begins philosophically: “Expect death.” It proceeds for six and half lines discussing the concept of death neutrally, estranged from any actual death, but then line 7: “You are clean, you arrive late” moves in three directions at once. It is continues the philosophical argument that death comes whether or not you are clean; it starts the narrative, the speaker arriving too late to stop the brother’s death because he doesn’t believe it will actually happen; and it stands alone where the speaker’s guilt teeters back and forth on the head of a comma: Are you clean (innocent, above reproach) or are you the one that arrives late (guilty, a failure)? By putting the narrative on the same line, even the same sentence as the philosophy, the poem moves forward in a rush, but the meaning washes back. Returning again and again to this story, Brown tells us some pains are too big to be told just once.

But although this book courses with pain, it also claims love as survival and triumph. One “Another Elegy” begins “To believe in God is to love / what none can see” (66). In Brown’s rewriting of The New Testament, love and the holy are inextricably intertwined. In “The Interrogation,” a speaker says, “Tell me that though the world ends us, / Lover it cannot end our love / Of narrative” (15). Once again, that beautiful line break that lets the sentence hold two ideas at the same time: love will be forever, and if not, the story will.

The New Testament by Jericho Brown is available from Copper Canyon Press.