Join Gregory Pardlo to discuss “Spectral Evidence.”
BOOK DISCUSSION DETAILS
5/22/2024
POETRY BY THE SEA, GUEST OF HONOR BANQUET + KEYNOTE READING | MERCY CENTER
167 Neck Rd
Madison, CT 06443
About the Author:
Gregory Pardlo’s ?collection? DIGEST (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors? include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection TOTEM was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. AIR TRAFFIC, a memoir in essays, is forthcoming from Knopf.
About the Book:
A powerful meditation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law, from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air Traffic
Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons”); and more.
At times cerebral and at other times warm, inviting and deeply personal, Spectral Evidence compels us to consider how we think about devotion, beauty and art; about the criminalization and death of Black bodies; about justice—and about how these have been inscribed into our present, our history, and the Western canon: “If I could be / the forensic dreamer / . . . / . . . my art would be a mortician’s / paints.”
