With 'Air Traffic,' Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Gregory Pardlo Turns To Memoir

Gregory Pardlo won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2015. In his new memoir, he explores his relationship with his father, an air traffic controller who was fired during the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike of 1981.

Pardlo (@Pardlo) joins Here & Now‘s Eric Westervelt (@Ericnpr) to talk about the book, “Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition & Manhood in America.”

Book Excerpt: ‘Air Traffic’

by Gregory Pardlo

An Introduction

Rt. 66

By some concoction of sugar, nicotine, prescription painkillers, rancor, and cocaine, my father, Gregory Pardlo, Sr., began killing himself after my parents separated in 2007. He measured his health and lifestyle against his will to live, and determined he had ten years left in the tank. Though he did “fuck up and live past sixty-five,” as he was afraid he might, he was only a year over budget. He lived his last years like a child with a handful of tokens at an arcade near closing