Bullet Points

“Bullet Points” is a lyric poem by American poet Jericho Brown that appears in his third collection, The Tradition (2019). Written in 2015, the poem first appeared online on Buzzfeed and was inspired by news reports. Brown has noted in several interviews that as a Black man, he was compelled to write “Bullet Points” as a message to his mother after being traumatized when several people of color died while they were incarcerated or detained by the police (See: Further Reading & Resources). After George Floyd was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020, causing protests nationwide, “Bullet Points” was posted on social media as a response to the incident. The poem went viral, enhancing Brown’s reputation as a poet who writes powerfully about the problems of contemporary society.

Brown’s three collections—Please (2008), The New Testament (2014), and The Tradition (2019)—have all been well received. The poems in each volume touch on myth and religion, racial inequality, Brown’s history as an abused child, and being a gay man living with HIV in the United States. In 2020, The Tradition received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Poet Biography

Brown was born Nelson Demrey III, in Shreveport, Louisiana, on April 14, 1976. Brown is the son of Nelson Demrey Jr., a deacon and the owner of a landscape business, and Neomia, a former schoolteacher. He has a younger sister, Nequella. Brown has written poems and talked in interviews about the abuse his father allegedly inflicted upon the family and how this affected him. As a child, Brown paid regular visits to the library, where he developed a love of reading fiction and poetry. Although he knew he was gay, he did come out due to the religious beliefs he grew up with and fear of disapproval.

In 1998, after graduating from Dillard University, a historically Black college, Brown went to New Orleans for graduate school. Knowing his poems would detail subject matter difficult for his family, he changed his name in 2001 and began publishing work under the name Jericho Brown. Simultaneously, he took a job with New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial as a speech writer. He received his master of fine arts (MFA) in creative writing from The University of New Orleans in 2002.

After completing doctorate studies at the University of Houston, Brown became a visiting assistant professor at San Diego State University. His first book Please, (2008) won the Whiting Award and the American Book Award. He received a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard in 2009, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry in 2011. In 2012, Brown was hired at Emory University in Atlanta as an associate professor. His second collection, New Testament, won the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for work that promotes an understanding of racism and human diversity. In 2016, Brown became professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and won a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Brown’s third book of poems, The Tradition, is the first to feature his invented form, the duplex. The collection was widely praised by critics and won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 2020, Brown became the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. In 2024, he was selected by the Academy of American Poets to join its Board of Chancellors. Highly respected and widely recognized, Brown also tours extensively, gives interviews and lectures, and leads workshops.

Poem text

Brown, Jericho. “Bullet Points.” 2015. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

In “Bullet Points,” the speaker, whom Brown has identified as himself, writes an anti-suicide note to his mother. In it, he tells her that if he dies in any of the ways that several citizens of color have died in encounters with police, she should not believe that this is death by suicide, even if it’s presented that way by others. These ways include being shot in the head or the back, being hanged, dying in a police car while handcuffed, or in the jail of a town he was driving through.

Brown notes that he trusts the worms that would eat him after burial far more than a police officer, whom he does not expect to be as respectful as a reverend or as tender as a caregiver. Guaranteeing that he will die in a different, more modern, less intentional way (smoking, choking on meat, or freezing unhoused in the cold), he again asserts that if he were to die in police custody, he would have been killed by the police themselves.

Brown notes that the taking of a human life—and the subsequent grief to the family and society as a whole—cannot be made up for by restitutions offered by local government. He concludes by insisting that the “body” (Line 28) is far more precious that any pristine bullet driven into the brain.