Charis welcomes Olatunde Osinaike and Gregory Pardlo in conversation with Aurielle Marie for a celebration of their recent poetry collections. Olatunde Osinaike's Tender Headed is a musical and formally playful meditation on Black identity and masculinity, selected by Camille Rankine as a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series. Gregory Pardlo's Spectral Evidence is a powerful meditation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law, from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air Traffic. Moderated by prize-winning poet and essayist Aurielle Marie this reading and conversation is one you don't want to miss.
About Tender Headed:
The irony of transformation often is that we mistake it to have occurred long before it does. Tender Headed takes its time in asserting the realization that growth remains ever ahead of you. Examining the themes of Black identity, accountability, and narration, we encounter a series of revealing snapshots into the role language plays in chiseling possibility and its rigid command of depiction. Olatunde Osinaike's startling debut sorts through the many-minded masks behind Black masculinity. At its center lies an inquiry about the puzzling nature of relationships, how ceaseless wonder can be in its challenge of a truth. In the name of music and self-identity, the speaker weaves their way through fault and how it amends Black life in America.
This is demonstrated best in how the demanding, yet vulnerable tone for the collection is set in "Men Like Me," its restless opening poem. Here, we find the speaker reciting a chronicle of generational neglect from men that became him also. Earnest and sharp, there is a beauty in seeing a poet not shy away from both the melancholy and resolve of rescripting their path while cherishing their steps and missteps along the way. This collection is a panel aching of fathers, sons, uncles, grandfathers, all of whom would do well to join in and confront shared privileges that are typically curtailed or altogether avoided in conversation. Tender Headed entrusts the heart to be a compass, insisting on a journey unto itself and a melodic detour toward tenderness precise with its own footing.
About Spectral Evidence:
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.”
About the Authors:
Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. He is the author of Tender Headed, selected by Camille Rankine as winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, in addition to the limited edition chapbooks Speech Therapy and The New Knew. His collection was also runner-up for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for the Alice James Award and CAAPP Book Prize. He lives in Atlanta and would like to thank you.
Gregory Pardlo is the author of the poetry collections Spectral Evidence and Digest, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem, winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden, and a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi.
About the Moderator:
Aurielle Marie is the author of Gumbo Ya Ya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). The winner of the 2021 Furious Flower Prize, the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Award, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia, on unceded Muskogee land.