Alice Cary

How are families shaped by race, economics, genetics, love, jealousy and rifts? These are the questions Gregory Pardlo ponders in his highly anticipated memoir, Air Traffic. “In studying my family’s destruction, I am studying my own,” he writes in a raw, telling statement.

Pardlo enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame in 2015, when his second book of poetry, Digest, won the Pulitzer Prize. Air Traffic is a narrative digest of his life and those of his family members, several of whom also experienced dramatic rises and falls. The poet delves deeply into a mosaic of memories, chronicling growing up black in Willingboro, New Jersey, in the 1970s and the battles he, his brother, father and other relatives have fought with depression, alcoholism and mental illness.

The Pardlos seemed firmly entrenched in middle-class security until August 5, 1981, when President Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, including Pardlo’s father. Gregory Sr. never quite recovered from the blow.

Meanwhile, during his teen years, the author’s “self-image was caught in a bitter custody battle between Alex. P. Keaton and Jimi Hendrix,” yet his adult years morph into a yo-yoing stream of failure and success.

The book’s powerful final chapter, “On Intervention,” offers a fascinating account of how Pardlo’s younger brother, Robbie, became the subject of the A&E reality show “Intervention” in 2010. Robbie shot to fame as a musician, once singing backup for Whitney Houston and forming the R&B trio City High, known for its Grammy-nominated hit, “What Would You Do?” Robbie’s drinking, however, caused his life to implode.

“Alcoholism was the Muzak of our familial dysfunction,” Pardlo explains. “Most of the time we didn’t even notice it.” Ironically, the intervention helped the author, not his brother, find his way to sobriety. However, Pardlo writes, “There can be no happily ever after for a recovering drunk like me.” That being said, Pardlo seems to be defying the odds, turning his pain into mesmerizing poetry and prose.

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Poet Stephen Kuusisto faced a crisis when he lost his job as a poetry professor in upstate New York. Kuusisto has been legally blind since birth, and he now needed a new job—and a new way of navigating the world. It’s a journey he explores in Have Dog, Will Travel.

Growing up in the 1950s, Kuusisto’s parents taught him to never show others his blindness, to live actively and try to ignore his limitations. He writes, “My parents thought disabled kids were victims of a nearly unimaginable fate, a predatory darkness.” Incredibly, he rode a bike, marched in Boy Scout parades and read with books pressed against his face. But he also faced endless bullying and was forced to live in a carefully circumscribed world that he navigated by familiarity and step counting. “Faking sight is like being illiterate—you pretend to competence but live by guesswork,” he writes. Nearing 40, he finally decided to stop pretending.

Kuusisto met with a representative from the New York State Commission for the Blind, who was hardly encouraging and doubted Kuusisto would find work. He referred Kuusisto to a company that manufactured plastic lemons for lemon juice, saying they sometimes hired blind people.

Yet he did not let this less-than- heartening meeting deter him from seeking assistance. Enter Kuusisto’s first guide dog, a yellow Labrador named Corky. Their “arranged marriage” expanded Kuusisto’s world by literal leaps and bounds, and their relationship forms the heart of this enchanting, enlightening book. As Kuusisto describes, having a guide dog “doesn’t feel like driving a car. It’s not like running. Sometimes I think it’s a bit like swimming. A really long swim when you’re buoyant and fast.”

Before long, Kuusisto is navigating the streets of New York City with Corky, experiencing a sense of freedom he’d never felt before. And in the years that followed, Corky not only liberated this poet but also ushered him back into the world, opening up his life in ways that he would never have imagined. Have Dog, Will Travel is an illuminating memoir of mobility, ability, delight and discovery.

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.