Digest (poetry collection)

Last updated
Digest
Cover design for Digest by Gregory Pardlo.jpg
Official Cover Design for Digest
Author Gregory Pardlo
Genre Poetry
Publisher Four Way Books
Publication date
2014
Publication place United States of America
ISBN 978-1-935536-50-5

Digest is a 2014 poetry collection by Gregory Pardlo published by Four Way Books. Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was a nominee for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 46th NAACP Image Award. [1] [2] Pardlo started work on the collection in 2004 "as an effort to mesh academic with creative writing." [3]

Description and overview

Digest can be described as a mix of free verse and prose poems. [4]

Pardlo described the "running theme of the book" as "to take . . . things and to digest them and make them my own." [5] This thematic line has also been described as a kind of identity formation, drawing on both national and personal history to define the limits of the collection's shared speaker. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Erdrich</span> Native American author in Minnesota (born 1954)

Karen Louise Erdrich is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pulitzer Prize for Poetry</span> American award for distinguished poetry

The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually for Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first presented in 1922, and is given for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, published during the preceding calendar year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gwendolyn Brooks</span> American writer (1917–2000)

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">W. S. Merwin</span> American poet (1927–2019)

William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharon Olds</span> American poet

Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. K. Williams</span> American poet, critic and translator (1936–2015)

Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.

Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, in 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">N. Scott Momaday</span> Native American author and academic (1934–2024)

Navarre Scotte Momaday was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tracy K. Smith</span> American poet (born 1972)

Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.

Word Riot was an American online magazine that published poetry, flash fiction, short stories, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, reviews, and interviews.

Cynthia Cruz is a contemporary American poet. She is the author of seven published poetry collections, and two works of cultural criticism. She currently teaches classes in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University.

Four Way Books is an American nonprofit literary press located in New York City, which publishes poetry and short fiction by emerging and established writers. It features the work of the winners of national poetry competitions, as well as collections accepted through general submission, panel selection, and solicitation by the editors. The press is run by director and founding editor Martha Rhodes, who is the author of five poetry collections. Four Way Books titles are distributed by University of Chicago Press. The press has received grants from New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses through their re-grant program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Sze</span> American poet (born 1950)

Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Major Jackson</span> American poet and professor (born 1968)

Major Jackson is an American poet and professor at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of six collections of poetry: Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems 2002-2022, The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn, winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. His prose is published in A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson. He is host of the podcast The Slowdown.

Cave Canem Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs and writing workshops across the United States. It is based in Brooklyn, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregory Pardlo</span> American poet, writer, and professor (born 1968)

Gregory Pardlo(born November 24, 1968) is an American poet, writer, and professor. His book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and on National Public Radio. His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gilbert M. Gaul</span>

Gilbert Martin Gaul is an American journalist. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes and been a finalist for four others.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Diane Seuss is an American poet and educator. Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charif Shanahan</span> American poet and translator

Charif Shanahan is an American poet and translator. His debut poetry collection Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing was the recipient of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, selected by Allison Joseph, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. His second collection, Trace Evidence: poems, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and is a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, his second Lammie nomination.

References

  1. "Digest via The Pulitzer Prize" . Retrieved 29 July 2024.
  2. "Digest – Four Way Books". fourwaybooks.com. Retrieved 29 July 2024.
  3. Writer, Sofiya Ballin, Inquirer Staff (28 April 2015). "Philly-born Gregory Pardlo talks about his Pulitzer for poetry". Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved 30 July 2024.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. "Three best poetry books of May". Washington Post. 9 April 2023. Retrieved 30 July 2024.
  5. Roché, Nicole (2016). "An Interview with Gregory Pardlo". CutBank (86): 74–85.
  6. "Digest – Four Way Books". fourwaybooks.com. Retrieved 30 July 2024.