Spectral Evidence
Poems
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- US$13.99
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LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY •
FINALIST FOR THE KINGSLEY TUFTS POETRY AWARD • 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.”
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The contemplative latest from Pulitzer winner Pardlo (for Digest) explores fear as the basis for legal judgment. As Pardlo explains in the introduction, the fear-driven imaginings used by white men to condemn those accused in the Salem witch trials have been similarly employed against nonwhite people from America's colonial era to the present. Beginning the collection with a long poem in sections titled "The Essay on Faith," which is structured like a legal argument the speaker is having with himself, Pardlo lays bare the flimsy foundations of America's justice system: "Dream, the via negativa that makes freedom ring. It/ is evidence of things not seen." Other entries play on this concept of unseen evidence, such as "Sonnet," which reproduces a table from a study of racial biases in the medical field. The title poem evokes the language of police perpetrators of violence against people of color to show how fear of the racialized "other" can be twisted to fit any legally excusable context: "Declares that on Harvest last, the Devil in the shape of a black man/ had the most aggressive face/ that his eyes were bugging out." With characteristic intelligence, Pardlo confronts uncomfortable and enduring truths.
