LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY • 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.”

"This is the author's first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest. Moving fluidly between considerations of the hip-hop group NWA, 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, Pardlo ponders the development of his own identity and sense of self as it was shaped against the glaring forces of whiteness"--