The New Testament
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry anthologies. His first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He serves as poetry editor for The Believer. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.
ALSO BY JERICHO BROWN
Please
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Earlier versions of these poems appeared in the following journals and anthologies: 44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the Election of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The American Poetry Review, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, At Length, The Believer, The Best American Poetry 2013, The Best American Poetry 2014, Boston Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Copper Nickel, Fence, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, Memorious, The Missouri Review, New Madrid, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Oxford American, Ploughshares, A Public Space, The Rumpus, Tin House, Transition, The Volta, Vinyl Poetry, and Weber—the Contemporary West.
This book was written with the support of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cave Canem, Emory University, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the University of San Diego.
First published 2014 by Copper Canyon Press,
PO Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368
First published in the UK in 2018 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2018 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-5098-8559-6
Copyright © Jericho Brown 2014
Cover image © The Barber of Suez by Leon Bonnat. Private Collection/Bridgeman Images
The right of Jericho Brown to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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