Spectral Evidence

A powerful mediation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air Traffic

Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—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.

At times challenging and at other times warm, inviting, and deeply personal ("Only by loving every child of this earth / can we be worthy of loving our own"), Spectral Evidence forces us to consider how we think about devotion, beauty and art, about the criminalization and death of Black lives, about justice, and how these have been inscribed into our present, our history, and the Western canon: "The risk of letting go the guard rails of fear, the risk of admitting want. So much easier to write a poem."