I’ve started picking up more poetry collections this year, trying to get over my fear of not understanding. Reading collections on Sundays is becoming a lovely little routine I look forward to, giving myself time to linger over them, take notes, and let myself off the hook if I read one that whooshes right over my head.

The Tradition by Jericho is this month’s @thestackspod book club pick, so I grabbed myself a copy since I couldn’t resist the gorgeous cover and the poems sounded really good. I thought it was a stellar collection, moving, intimate yet political, with most poems offering up lines which knock you for six. The poems cycle between personal and political, but even the personal ones remind us that, especially for queer Black men, the personal is political. Brown moves through topics like masculinity, Blackness, queerness, familial and romantic relationships and more, often intersecting them.

I learned from the back cover that he invented the new form of the ‘duplex’ which are scattered throughout. At first I didn’t get them, but by the last one, made up of lines from all the previous ones, I was a little bit in awe.

From the reviews, Bullet Points is the favourite for a lot of people, so I probably sound like a tired cliché but it was just so powerful. I read it several times and each time raised goosebumps. Some other favourites were The Peaches, The Legend of Big and Fine, Riddle, Foreday in the Morning and The Tradition.