paper • 76 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-50-5
Digest by Gregory Pardlo Makes “Ten Favorite Poetry Books of 2014″ List in NY Times
Read an Interview with Gregory Pardlo for Guernica
Read David St.-Lascaux’s Interview with Gregory Pardlo for Interrupting Infinity
Read a Review of Digest in The Artery
Digest is the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, an Editor’s Choice in Poetry for Shelf Unbound 2016, a nominee for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the recipient of an honorable mention for the Foreword Reviews‘ 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award in Poetry, and was nominated for the 46th NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Digest was selected by Lloyd Schwartz for The Artery’s (WBUR) “Fiction, Biography, Poetry And More — The Best Books Of 2015” list.
Digest
Gregory Pardlo
From Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father’s eyes and through their own.
“Chalk Dust on the Air,”from Digest:
Our hero explains what lines behave as waves
also behave as particles depending upon the presence
of observers, a market of admirers, etc. Think of sifted
sands Tibetan monks spend months to whisk in minutes:
their attack on nostalgia. Think of Milky Ways of water
damage on the bedroom ceiling. The Apollo module
on the dresser and the Ring Nebula is the blur where
Mom tried to clean expletives crayoned on the wall.
Whorls beyond, imagine a can of Krylon ship-shaped
with braided-rubber-band-propeller roped out to
the nosebleeds in the murk of heaven’s hood. The spray
can tags earth’s dewy rooftop with synesthetic stars,
foamy scars that welt the blue and melt like meringue
in the dusk, a residue of light in the periphery. Winged seeds
from silver maples at the feet of unshaven sheriffs
offering fists of baby’s breath. They smile with cigar stubs
plugging the breach. Renegade lines unleash the hounds,
shake the weight of undressed eyes. When some lines try
to pass for the color behind the color they came in, our hero
attempts no intervention. When he orders the lines disperse,
one sheriff’s bullhorn blast unsacks a rain of feathers