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DIGEST GREGORY PARDLO MEDIA KIT FOUR WAY BOOKS Publication Date: October 2014 • 978-1-935536-50-5 • Poetry • $15.95 • Paper, 84 pages • 6 x 9 Orders: UPNE • 1-800-421-1561 / www.upne.com Please send tear sheets to: Four Way Books, PO Box 535, Village Station, New York, NY 10014 [email protected] 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/

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Page 1: Download the Digest Media Kit

DIGEST

GREGORY PARDLO

MEDIA KIT

F O U R WAY B O O K S

Publication Date: October 2014 • 978-1-935536-50-5 • Poetry • $15.95 • Paper, 84 pages • 6 x 9Orders: UPNE • 1-800-421-1561 / www.upne.com

Please send tear sheets to:Four Way Books, PO Box 535, Village Station, New York, NY 10014

[email protected]

2015 PULITZER PRIZE WINNER IN POETRY2015 NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE

ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS STANDOUT BOOK OF 2014NY 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/

Page 2: Download the Digest Media Kit

Four Way Books is grateful to the following organizations who helped to support publication of this book:

Selected Support

For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: [email protected]

For review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, [email protected] / (212) 334 5430

Page 3: Download the Digest Media Kit

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

Introduction

For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: [email protected] review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, [email protected] / (212) 334 5430

Page 4: Download the Digest Media Kit

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.”

AboutGregory Pardlo

For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: [email protected] review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, [email protected] / (212) 334 5430

Page 5: Download the Digest Media Kit

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

Select Praise

For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: [email protected] review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, [email protected] / (212) 334 5430

Page 6: Download the Digest Media Kit

Interview with The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/books/gregory-pardlo-pu-litzer-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.you-tube.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-the-poem-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-transla-tor-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

Select Media

For speaking inquiries or interview requests, please contact Vaughan Ashlie Fielder at The Field Office: [email protected] review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, [email protected] / (212) 334 5430

Page 7: Download the Digest Media Kit

Problema 3

Gregory Pardlo

The Fulton St. Foodtown is playing Motown and I’m surprisedat how quickly my daughter picks up the tune. And soonthe two of us, plowing rows of goods steeped in fructoseunder 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’scruising the polished aisles on a tractor laden with imperishablefoodstuffs. her cornball father enthusiastically promptingwith spins and flourishes and the double-barrel fingersof the gunslinger’s pose. But we hear it as we round the riceand Goya aisle, that other music, the familiar exchange of anger,the war drums of parent and child. The boy wants, what, to becarried? to eat the snacks right from his mother’s basket?What does it matter, he is making a scene. With no self-interestbeyond the pleasure of replacing wonder with wonder, my daughterasks 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 faceperforms, the inherited terror of non-conformity frosted with the fearof being thought disrespected by, or lacking the will to discipline,one’s child? how can I account for both the cultural and the inter-cultural? The boy’s cries rising like hosannas as the mother’s pursefalls from her shoulder. her missed step from the ledgeof one of her stilted heels, passion loosed with each displacedhairpin. his little jacket bunched at the collar where she has workedthe marionette. Later, when I’m placing groceries on the conveyorbelt and it is clear I’ve forgotten the ice cream, my daughtertries her hand at this new algorithm of love, each wordpunctuated 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: [email protected] review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, [email protected] / (212) 334 5430

Page 8: Download the Digest Media Kit

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: [email protected] review and exam copies, and other inquiries, please contact Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, [email protected] / (212) 334 5430