Digest
by Gregory Pardlo
Summary
Digest takes its title from Gregory Pardlo's own account of the book's method: he began the collection in 2004 as an effort to mesh academic and creative writing, and the poems that resulted treat personal and national history the way a body treats food, taking things in and making them genuinely one's own rather than simply reporting on them from a safe distance. The book combines free verse with prose poems, moving easily between the two as the material demands.
Pardlo writes about Black fatherhood, marriage, and labor as inherited material to be worked through rather than simply described, examining the boundary between an individual life and the larger collective history that shapes it. He has said the book's running theme is exactly that act of digestion, taking in experience and history alike and turning it into something the poems can claim as their own, a process the poems enact formally as much as they describe it thematically.
Reading Digest means following a voice that is intellectually restless and formally flexible, comfortable moving from a tightly wound lyric into a looser prose poem within the same sequence. It suits a reader interested in how a poet processes inherited history, a father's labor, a family's expectations, the wider weight of race in America, into language that claims rather than merely records that inheritance, treating the lyric itself as a place to work through rather than simply display what has been passed down. The book asks a reader to do some of that digestive work as well, connecting a family memory in one poem to a broader historical claim in the next without always supplying an explicit bridge between them.
Historical Context & Significance
Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; that year's finalists were Alan Shapiro's Reel to Reel and Arthur Sze's Compass Rose. The book also received nominations for the Hurston or Wright Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award, recognition that reached beyond the usual poetry prize circuit.
Pardlo was born in Philadelphia in 1968 and grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey, the son of an air traffic controller who took part in the 1981 strike that ended his father's career in that profession. He served in the United States Marine Corps before completing degrees at Rutgers University in Camden, New York University, and Columbia University, and earning a doctorate from the CUNY Graduate Center. His debut collection, Totem, had already won the American Poetry Review or Honickman First Book Prize in 2007, before Digest brought him the Pulitzer eight years later.