Scribd Logo

Language

Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

Enjoy millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, and more, with a free trial

Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Digest
Digest
Digest
Ebook88 pages2 hours

Digest

By Gregory Pardlo

3.5/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

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.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherFour Way Books
Release dateApr 1, 2016
ISBN9781935536819
Digest
Read preview

Related to Digest

Related ebooks

Related podcast episodes

Related articles

  • Article

    Still Dancing

    Feb 13, 2019

    Still Dancing
    12 min read

  • Article

    The Art of Fiction No. 244

    Sep 15, 2019

    The Art of Fiction No. 244
    30 min read

  • Article

    Energy

    Feb 12, 2020

    Energy
    16 min read

  • Article

    Two Poems

    Sep 1, 2021

    Two Poems
    2 min read

  • Article

    DeLillo, Lethem, and the Seductive Sentence

    Apr 11, 2018

    DeLillo is so famously and distinctively a writer who appeals to sentence-lovers, with all their blindnesses, hubristic ideals, and narrow-minded cerebrations. The post DeLillo, Lethem, and the Seductive Sentence appeared first on The Millions.

    10 min read

  • Article

    The Making of a Tireless Literary Translator

    Mar 29, 2017

    Megan McDowell, a translator from Kentucky living in Chile, has had eight books published in the past two years. “It’s not really healthy what I do, because I work a lot,” she tells me. “But a lot of those books I’ve been working on for a really long

    7 min read

  • Article

    Twelve Films That Put Me in the Mood to Write

    Dec 14, 2022

    1. Somewhere (2010), written and directed by Sofia Coppola. Coppola is our greatest living director. The interiors (and exteriors) of the Chateau Marmont hotel in L.A. are beautiful here. So is watching a man (Stephen Dorff) in existential trouble. A

    3 min read

  • Article

    Literary MagNet

    Aug 12, 2020

    Writer and editor Hafizah Geter traces the origin of her poetry collection, Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, September 2020), to when she was nineteen and her mother died of a stroke. A month later Geter took a semester off from college to hel

    3 min read

  • Article

    Dear Fellow Black Writers

    Aug 12, 2020

    Dear Fellow Black Writers
    2 min read

  • Article

    A Year in Reading: Elaine Castillo

    Dec 1, 2020

    The writing in it is overall sort of bad, and somehow that’s been a balm, too: somehow I’m finding that I can’t bear a certain kind of good writing; it fits like an expensive coat whose style is all wrong for my body, for the climate, for the era. Th

    8 min read

  • Article

    Not Enough Beds

    Jul 1, 2020

    Not enough beds, enough sponges and clean rags, enough pillowcases. Not enough hospitals. Fifty thousand patients, in a city with a population only half again larger than that. Not enough shovels, neither time nor room to bury the dead. Not enough ch

    5 min read

  • Article

    On Setting and Craft

    Nov 8, 2017

    It’s not that I find character and plot and structure unimportant. It’s that, for me, they’re deeply intertwined with place. The post On Setting and Craft appeared first on The Millions.

    6 min read

  • Article

    War Of The Beasts And The Animals, And In Memory Of Memory By Maria Stepanova – Review

    Apr 13, 2021

    Translated poetry seldom finds its way into this column. It is too high risk: there is the probability the original voice will seem muffled or will not travel. But an exception has to be made for Maria Stepanova, born in Moscow and a leading voice in

    2 min read

  • Article

    The Corals And The Capitalist

    Dec 1, 2022

    The Corals And The Capitalist
    15 min read

  • Article

    Three Triptychs

    Jan 1, 2021

    Woke to the “meanerror,” of birds squawkinginside the blue-greyblackpolyphonies of whathappens when we losethe terminologyto determine how badthings really are. Wasthere no way to puncturethe agonizing filmthat kept us all corralledhere? I looked thr

    3 min read

  • Article

    Varieties of Experience

    Sep 1, 2020

    THERE IS A PUZZLE at the heart of my academic work. I am an anthropologist, and among other things, I study the voices (or auditory hallucinations) of people in different countries who have schizophrenia. Their voices are clearly shaped by local cult

    4 min read

  • Article

    Deadlines

    Apr 14, 2021

    POETS & WRITERS MAGAZINE ANNOUNCES state, national, and international prizes in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. We list only prizes of $1,000 or more, prizes of $500 or more that charge no entry fee, and prestigious nonmonetary awards. Appl

    19 min read

  • Article

    Starting Out in an MFA Program?

    Aug 12, 2020

    I HAVE taught fiction writing for almost three decades and served as program director of two graduate programs—the MA program in creative writing and literature at Kansas State University and the MFA program in creative writing at Oregon State Univer

    9 min read

  • Article

    Tiana Clark

    Dec 12, 2018

    University of Pittsburgh Press (Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize) I think about patience and its stupid song.I can’t wait— Yes, I’m always looking backat my dead.—from “After Orpheus” HOW IT BEGAN: Survival. The seed of this collection is about poet

    2 min read

Related categories

Reviews for Digest

3.5/5

11 ratings2 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • 5/5
    If you’re looking for poetry you can read through on the first try and “get it”, then this is not a book for you. If you don’t want to spend time with your poems, staring into each other’s eyes and discovering new features and shades over the course of days and days, then this not a book for you. Pardlo’s poems are dense, complex, and full of meaning that one must sit with for extended periods of time to mine. It is well worth the effort, and I know I will keep coming back to this book over and over again.
  • 5/5
    A powerful collection of diverse poems which is justly deserving of all the acclaim it has garnered. I especially enjoyed the occasional series of poems linked together by a common thread, One series of poems, for instance, begins with each one being kick started by a quote from a famous historical personage (St. Augustine, for instance) In fact. Mr. Pardlo's poems are effectively drenched with historical references. I love the way Pardlo gives deeply of himself in each well constructed verse.

Book preview

Digest - Gregory Pardlo

Fita

Written by Himself

I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet

whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye;

I was born across the river where I

was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,

broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though

it please you, through no fault of my own,

pockets filled with coffee grounds and eggshells.

I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden.

I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion.

I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air,

air drifting like spirits and old windows.

I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry;

I was an index of first lines when I was born.

I was born waist-deep stubborn in the water crying

ain’t I a woman and a brother I was born

to this hall of mirrors, this horror story I was

born with a prologue of references, pursued

by mosquitoes and thieves, I was born passing

off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born.

I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves;

I walked a piece of the way alone before I was born.

Marginalia

for Colin Channer

‘sing the Union cause, sing us,/ the poor, the marginal.’

–Robert Hayden, ‘Homage to Paul Robeson’

Preamble

Note the confection of your body

salt on the breeze, the corn-

silk sky. Olmstead’s signature

archways and meadows. Kite

strings tensing the load of a saddle-

backed wind. This is Prospect Park,

Brooklyn, where limbs tickle

and jounce as if ice cubes shiver

along the shirtsleeves of evergreens. Pond

water whispers, and the echoes of Yankee

fifes linger in wind and in the shirring jazz

hands of leaves, and those shirts,

the skins, the human retinue converging

on the uneven playing fields. The African

drum and dance circle sways the pignut

tree into a charismatic trance

Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1