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Poetry Totem, Copper Canyon Press, 2007 Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize In Totem, Gregory Pardlo investigates the meaning of representation-what it means to shoulder the weight of cultural, racial and literary expectations, and its costs. Pardlo's obsession is the impossibility of fully capturing the image, and the larger question of the role of the New World writer and his relationship to history, marginalization and the politics of representation. How does one defy the tradition that he loves? Pardlo's choice is to expand it, to take his cues from jazz musicians, those incorrigible reinventors and reshapers of meaning and expectation. Totem is an assured debut by a writer who claims a wider territory-the world beyond the Bantu Stands of "the urban"- a writer who knows it, who understands it and loves it, and that is why he defies it, to keep it honest, to keep it whole. "'Herewith,' announces the tour-de-force opening poem in 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 |
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"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 Reviews of Totem Jordan Davis in the Constant Critic, 2008. Abdul Ali and Fred Joiner in Post No Ills Magazine online, 2008. Rigoberto Gonzáles in his Poetry Foundation blog, 2008. Kent Shaw in his blog lots and lots of neat, 2009. |
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