What is a music lover to do? MTV and VH1 have replaced music videos with shows purporting to give us The Real World and Rock of Love. Itunes and corporate executives have whittled songs down to their “exact worth” (69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.39 depending on where songs place on the Billboard Top 40). Fans are hard pressed to remember that once music, even popular music, seemed to be a one-on-one conversation between the singer and the fan. Fortunately, poet Jericho Brown writes that reminds readers of those times. Structured as an R&B album, Please – Brown’s debut collection of poems – gives voice to his experiences as a gay black man while also arguing that music is about more than the bottom dollar.

You won’t find saccharine pop rhythms here. When Brown invokes music, we hear work songs, slave chants, gospels, and most often, the blues. In “Pause, ” a speaker says that when people assume that he must be happy just because they hear him hum: “I want to ask / if they ever heard of slavery, / the work song – the best music / is made of subtraction.” Indeed, Brown’s poems are often motivated by loss and isolation. He avoids sentimentality by recognizing that though we are often abandoned, we just as often push people away. The book opens with “Track 1: Lush Life” which vacillates between praising a singer’s voice and fearing the hurt that laces each note: “The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you, / to see you shake your head. The mic may as well / be a leather belt.”

Throughout the collection, we hear from singers like Luther Vandross, Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, and Donny Hathaway, singers who are associated with musical brilliance as well as pain. These persona poems allow Brown to find these icons in their dressing rooms, exhausted and without a spotlight. Diana Ross, for example, is someone we might expect to simply throw sequins and hair extensions our way. In Jericho Brown’s conception, however, the legendary Ms. Ross is envisioned as a woman trying to make sense of turbulent times: “ I learned the word assassin / and watched cities burn. / Got another #1 and somebody / set Detroit on fire.” In “Track 5: Summertime,” Joplin confesses that she’s haunted by the memory of watching a boy get beaten up. “I saw some kids whip him with a belt while he / repeated, Please. School out, summertime / and the living lashed…” The idea that someone being attacked would yell out “Please” instead of the word “Stop” reverberates throughout the collection.

Brown is able to seamlessly place music icons into a constellation of his own family members and lovers: a mother who goes back to her abusive husband, a homeless gay teenager, a father who prefers to speak with the back of his hand. These voices are united by a menace that can never be fully exorcised, only recognized and sung about.

- Saeed Jones