Air Traffic

February 15, 2018
A celebrated poet shares the stories that defined him.Near the beginning of his first work of nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize winner Pardlo (Digest, 2014, etc.) discusses the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike of 1981, which served as a way for Ronald Reagan to demonstrate his presidential power. The author's father, an air traffic controller at the time, was fired from his job and forced to start anew in a society that posed systemic obstacles for black families. "I learned from my father that there was no glory in just winning," writes Pardlo. "Capricious, pendular, my father's wont was to sway by the rope of his devotions, to and fro, and winning was a one-way trip. What point was there in winning if it precluded the possibility of a comeback?" Punctuated by anecdotes and explorations of his relationship to his father and heritage, the book is a careful and delicately crafted window into the private life of the author, imparting knowledge and insight on identity and race politics in 20th-century America. Pardlo tells of the aftermath of his father's termination, which led the author to join the Marines, travel abroad, slide into alcoholism, and, ultimately, find love. "I imagined freedom as a kind of armor that would protect me....I wanted to remake myself as a cosmopolitan artist with a magical blue passport," he writes, "but I had only a two-word vocabulary for escape: money and power." Pardlo's work is masterfully personal, with passages that come at you with the urgent force of his powerful convictions: "What's shameful is when poets, writers, artists deny culpability for perpetuating stereotypes or, worse yet, when we champion stereotypes to pander to our readers' need to believe in a predictable, knowable world." The author manages to distill stereotypes to their very core, providing a genuine and productive exposition of issues of masculinity in the contemporary world.An engrossing memoir of history and memory.

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March 12, 2018
Pardlo’s boisterous and affectionate memoir tells of a life of alienation, self-destructive behavior, and the search for self. Pardlo (Digest), a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, and was 13 when his father lost his job in the 1981 air controllers’ strike. The adolescent Pardlo often engaged in a fierce competition with his father, egged on by his father’s arrogance and pride, that lasted until his father’s death in 2015. Pardlo was a mediocre high school student, and after he graduated he escaped his father by joining the Marine Corps. The next step of his rebellion happened when he met a Danish woman named Maya, who became his first wife; they moved to Copenhagen, where he enrolled in the University of Copenhagen, dropped out, moved back the New Jersey, became a bar manager, and began drinking. Eventually, he finished college and met and married a woman named Ginger, and they became parents; it was then that Pardlo began to contemplate the stresses and challenges that his own father must have faced raising him. Pardlo’s memoir powerfully illustrates one man’s attempt to reconcile the ways that family dynamics influence and infiltrate people’s lives.

Starred review from February 1, 2018
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Pardlo's (Digest, 2014) development as an artist is the elastic thread running through the memoir he calls his Step Four: a searching and fearless inventory that places his story beside those of the men in his Philadelphia-based family. When Pardlo's maternal grandfather, Bob, arrived in Tulsa in 1951 for training at the Civil Aeronautics Administration, a sheriff greeted his plane as strangers packed the tarmac to see the black men whose arrival had been announced in the paper. Pardlo's father, Big Greg, who wielded his potential and invulnerability as currency, would follow in Bob's footsteps until his prominent role in the 1981 air-traffic controllers strike, ended infamously by President Reagan, ensured he'd never work in the field again. Putting his family's past on the page, Pardlo pays special attention to mental illness and addiction: Alcoholism was the Muzak of our familial dysfunction. In the book's final essay, Pardlo reluctantly participates in his brother Robbie's episode of Intervention at their mother's behest, wondering if it should be himself under examination and considering his own role as a father. Endlessly introspective, wide-ranging, and lucid, Pardlo's fearless inventory stuns with beautifully written, fully saturated snapshots of rich and complicated familial love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2018

Pardlo, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, turns his attention to autobiography in a rare and honest view of an artist in the prime of his career. The author did not follow the usual course to literary success. In this memoir, he describes life in a stable family in Willingboro, NJ, until his father was fired from his job as an air traffic controller because of his involvement in the 1981 Air Traffic Controllers strike. Pardlo then joined the marines, went to Denmark, spent years in and out of college, and battled alcoholism. As he grew into maturity, he struggled with the legacy of his father and family relationships, a story laced with passion and humor all within the perspective of growing up as a black man in America. The author's views on reading and writing poetry assist in creating a picture of how he sees life and the medium of his artistry. As he explains, poetry never paid his bar bill or made him virtuous but helps him avoid "blind spots," which block his progressions to growth and manhood. VERDICT A must-read for anyone looking to explore the psyche of African American families in America.--Boyd Childress, formerly with Auburn Univ. Libs., AL

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2018

After winning the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize for his poetry collection, Totem, Pardlo followed up with Digest and won the Pulitzer Prize. So expect only the best writing from this memoir about a father's legacy, a son's struggles, and the burdens of African American manhood. Pardlo's middle-class African American family was reasonably well off until his father lost his job after participating in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Strike of 1981 and sank into addiction. Greg Jr. wended his way from marine boot camp to college (several tries) to alcohol before love and parenthood set him straight.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.