As if blown through Coltrane’s sax, Ed Pavlic’s words offer hope for a consciousness that will repair the world. Like Coltrane, Pavlic makes the deed 'intimate and soulful'... Pavlic’s poems still seduce like overheard confidences, but they now extend to prose narratives and reports from occupied territories, as James Baldwin once framed it. Pavlic’s text offers a lyric theater of breaking news from our daily infernos. —Benjamin Hollander, The New York Times
Pavlic (Who Can Afford to Improvise?), two-time winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition, blends memoir and lyric in this genre-bending collection, fearlessly exploring the personal and political boundaries of race, history, and heritage. —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno arrives right on time while managing, in its depth and breadth, to be timeless, presenting an indelible example of what poetry might look and sound like when it strives to engage critically with our contemporary world. Reverberating with a lyric form and flow grounded in the backbeats of hip hop, jazz’s improvisatory play and r&b’s soulful truth-telling, and fully conversant with multiple traditions—from Shakespeare through (Po-)PoMO and popular culture—these poems put the political back in poetics and poetry back in the news. —National Poetry Series Judge John Keene
As if blown through Coltrane’s sax, Ed Pavlic’s words offer hope for a consciousness that will repair the world. Like Coltrane, Pavlic makes the deed 'intimate and soulful'... Pavlic’s poems still seduce like overheard confidences, but they now extend to prose narratives and reports from occupied territories, as James Baldwin once framed it. Pavlic’s text offers a lyric theater of breaking news from our daily infernos. —Benjamin Hollander, The New York Times
Pavlic (Who Can Afford to Improvise?), two-time winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition, blends memoir and lyric in this genre-bending collection, fearlessly exploring the personal and political boundaries of race, history, and heritage. —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno arrives right on time while managing, in its depth and breadth, to be timeless, presenting an indelible example of what poetry might look and sound like when it strives to engage critically with our contemporary world. Reverberating with a lyric form and flow grounded in the backbeats of hip hop, jazz’s improvisatory play and r&b’s soulful truth-telling, and fully conversant with multiple traditions—from Shakespeare through (Po-)PoMO and popular culture—these poems put the political back in poetics and poetry back in the news. —National Poetry Series Judge John Keene
