media kit - Gregory Pardlo

GREGORY
PARDLO
DIGEST
MEDIA KIT
Publication Date: October 2014 • 978-1-935536-50-5 • Poetry • $15.95 • Paper, 84 pages • 6 x 9
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Four Way Books, PO Box 535, Village Station, New York, NY 10014
publicity@fourwaybooks.com
2015 PULITZER PRIZE WINNER IN POETRY
2015 NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE
ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS STANDOUT BOOK OF 2014
NY TIMES BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2014
Finalist for the 2015 Hurston Wright Legacy Award, as well as a 2014 indiefab Book of the Year Finalist
Website: http://www.pardlo.com/
F O U R W AY B O O K S
Selected Support
For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: fielder@fieldofficeagency.com
For review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, publicity@fourwaybooks.com / (212) 334 5430
Four Way Books is grateful to the following organizations who helped to support publication of this book:
Introduction
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.
PRAISE FOR DIGEST
“A bright-red thread of fatherhood runs through this book—at times tenuous, at times mythic—
always searching and revelatory, grounded in our present moment while wrestling with eternity—
a thrilling, brilliant, and deeply moving ride.”
—Nick Flynn
“Gregory Pardlo renders history just as clearly and palpably as he renders New York City, or
Copenhagen, or his native New Jersey. But mostly what he renders is America, with its intractable
conundrums and its clashing iconographies. With lines that balance poise and a jampacked
visceral music, and images that glimmer and seethe together like a conflagration, these poems are
a showcase for Pardlo’s ample and agile mind, his courageous social conscience, and his mighty
voice.”
—Tracy K. Smith
“In an age of poems crafted to resemble linguistic balloon-animals or sheets of floral wallpaper, it
is rare to find an American poet thinking seriously about anything. I suppose that’s what makes
Gregory Pardlo’s engaged, intelligent poetry, with its exuberant range of cultural and historical
reference, feel a bit like stumbling out of the desert to encounter the Nile River. Smart and
humane, Digest engages in lyricized textual analysis, playful philosophical exegesis, and satirical
syllabi building, even as it evokes a Whitmanesque Brooklyn of the 21st Century that Pardlo
inhabits with a ‘neighborknowing confidence and ease.’ These are poems that delight the ear,
encourage the heart, and nourish the brain.”
—Campbell McGrath
“A brainy, compassionate book (Pardlo’s second) that uses a pleasingly large stylistic palette to
paint a portrait of fatherhood, racial politics and Brooklyn before it became a place to buy $30
glasses of bourbon.”
—David Orr, The New York Times
For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: fielder@fieldofficeagency.com
For review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, publicity@fourwaybooks.com / (212) 334 5430
About
Gregory Pardlo
Born in Philadelphia in 1968, Gregory Pardlo is a graduate of Rutgers University, Camden. As an
undergraduate, he managed the small jazz club his grandfather owned in nearby Pennsauken,
NJ. He received the MFA from NYU as a New York Times Fellow in Poetry in 2001. Pardlo is the
author of Totem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Review / Honickman Prize, and translator
of Niels Lyngsoe’s, Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace (Bookthug, 2004). His poems have appeared
in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, and two editions
of Best American Poetry, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology
of Contemporary African American Poetry. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the
Arts Fellowship and a fellowship for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He
has received other fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Lotos Club Foundation and Cave
Canem. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and teaches
undergraduate writing at Columbia University. He serves as an Associate Editor of Callaloo, and
is a facilitator of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop.
Of the book, Pardlo writes, “My wife and I had just had our second child when I started writing
Digest. The poems reflect my anxiety around being the father of young children. When I began
studying for the Ph.D., I grew conscious of the way, mentally, I had to change gears in order to
move between scholarly and creative work. I wanted to write poems that reflect how much I
enjoy learning and sharing what I learn, and I didn’t want to have to ‘change tracks’ to write
them. The poems in Digest grow out of that effort as well.”
For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: fielder@fieldofficeagency.com
For review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, publicity@fourwaybooks.com / (212) 334 5430
Select Praise
PAST
“’Herewith,’ announces the tour-de-force opening poem in [Totem,] Greg Pardlo’s wild
ride of a debut, ‘I proclaim the orthodoxies intended to preclude our kind / of prodigality
are disinherited.’ Read it both ways: ‘our kind’ are now included, and this poet himself is
prodigiously inclusive. A gorgeous lyric like ‘Double Dutch’ proves he can hold a singular focus,
but what these poems really want is the layered simultaneity of a restless conciousness making
a provisional order: a pattern almost collapsing, then somehow, miraculously, not. Totem is a
giddy, splendid and discomfiting book.”
—Mark Doty
“Pure and plain, Gregory Pardlo is an American metaphysician. His luxuriant mind is discursive,
drawing on many intellectual and cultural traditions, and for him, the world is singularly and
greatest understood at its figurative core. You will enjoy best those poems which reveal the
intricate journeys by which he fabrics an argument, not with himself, but with the rich legacy
of conversations about kinship, history, art, and poetry from which he emerges, and always
on top. This is a poetry whose reach will break you and whose achievement goes beyond the
accidental discoveries of an eccentric personality—and thus arrives a poet whose vision is
so wide, he’ll have readers in the distant future, contemplating his moral and formal choices
relative to their own.”
—Major Jackson
For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: fielder@fieldofficeagency.com
For review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, publicity@fourwaybooks.com / (212) 334 5430
Select Media
Interview with The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/books/gregory-pardlo-pulitzer-winner-for-poetry-on-his-sudden-fame.html
Reading “Palling Around”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sHBmju84F0&feature=youtu.be
Reading with Sarah Plimpton and Victoria Redel at the New York Society Library: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlUmbXJoLYc
Reading with Julie Sheehan at Big Apple BAP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPaDWHQOp20
Reading at the 2011 Callaloo Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ3vqoV57-4
Reading with Gabriel Welsch at Bowdoin College: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxP2B06-E8s
Interview with Erica Wright for Guernica: https://www.guernicamag.com/daily/gregory-pardlo-thepoem-as-pursuit/
Interview with Jonterri Gadson for Meridian: http://readmeridian.org/issues/29/Interview.pdf
“Controlled Abandon: A Conversation with Gregory Pardlo” for PEN America: http://www.pen.org/
controlled-abandon-conversation-gregory-pardlo
Art Talk with Paulette Beete for the NEA: http://arts.gov/art-works/2012/art-talk-poet-and-translator-gregory-pardlo
CUNY Podcast: http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/podcasts/2007/07/30/test/
Interview with Ching-In Chen for The Conversant: http://theconversant.org/?p=8852
Academy of American Poets: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/atlantic-city-sunday-morning
For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: fielder@fieldofficeagency.com
For review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, publicity@fourwaybooks.com / (212) 334 5430
Problema 3
Gregory Pardlo
The Fulton St. Foodtown is playing Motown and I’m surprised
at how quickly my daughter picks up the tune. And soon
the two of us, plowing rows of goods steeped in fructose
under light thick as corn oil, are singing Baby,
I need your lovin’, unconscious of the lyrics’ foreboding.
My happy child riding high in the shopping cart as if she’s
cruising the polished aisles on a tractor laden with imperishable
foodstuffs. Her cornball father enthusiastically prompting
with spins and flourishes and the double-barrel fingers
of the gunslinger’s pose. But we hear it as we round the rice
and Goya aisle, that other music, the familiar exchange of anger,
the war drums of parent and child. The boy wants, what, to be
carried? to eat the snacks right from his mother’s basket?
What does it matter, he is making a scene. With no self-interest
beyond the pleasure of replacing wonder with wonder, my daughter
asks me to name the boy’s offense. I offer to buy her ice cream.
How can I admit recognizing the portrait of fear the mother’s face
performs, the inherited terror of non-conformity frosted with the fear
of being thought disrespected by, or lacking the will to discipline,
one’s child? How can I account for both the cultural and the intercultural? The boy’s cries rising like hosannas as the mother’s purse
falls from her shoulder. Her missed step from the ledge
of one of her stilted heels, passion loosed with each displaced
hairpin. His little jacket bunched at the collar where she has worked
the marionette. Later, when I’m placing groceries on the conveyor
belt and it is clear I’ve forgotten the ice cream, my daughter
tries her hand at this new algorithm of love, each word
punctuated by her little fist: boy, she commands, didn’t I tell you?
For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: fielder@fieldofficeagency.com
For review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, publicity@fourwaybooks.com / (212) 334 5430
Black Pampers
Gregory Pardlo
837. Wilson, Shurli-Anne Mfumi. Black Pampers: Raising
Consciousness in the Post-Nationalist Home. Blacktalk Press,
Lawnside, NJ, 1976. 442 pp., illustrator unknown. 10 ½ x 11 7/8”.
Want tips for nursery décor? Masks and hieroglyphics, akwaba dolls.
Send Raggedy Ann to the trash heap. This tome is a how-to for upwardly
mobile black parents beset with the guilt of assimilation. Revealed
here are the safetypinnings of the nascent black middleclass, their
leafy split-level cribs and infants with Sherman Hemsley hairlines. Of
interest are bedtime polemics on the racist derivations of “The Wheels
on the Bus.” Chapter headings address important questions of the day:
How and how soon should you intervene if you suspect your child lacks
rhythm? At what age should you begin initiating your little one to the
historical memory of slavery? And how ethical is the two-cake solution
(one party for classmates, and a second so you can invite the cousins)?
Indispensible to collectors for whom Aesop’s African origin is no matter
of debate will be the gloss and annotation, comprising the bulk of the
text, of the lyrics to Stevie Wonder’s “Black Man.” According to the
jacket copy, one of the alternate titles considered was, “What to Expect
When You’re No Longer Expecting Revolution.”
Usual occasional scattered light foxing to interiors; contemporary tree
calf exceptional. About-fine condition. $75.00
For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: fielder@fieldofficeagency.com
For review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, publicity@fourwaybooks.com / (212) 334 5430