Let?s Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno

by Ed Pavlić

"You've been thinking to yourself that it all feels very American." Ed Pavlic's tireless, resourceful speaker is American, of indeterminate race, implicated at every conceivable point of entry into the struggles that go on "here," which is everywhere, the Inferno of the "if an //analogy affects an enemy then let's let // inferno the enemy inferno the enemy." In a "Daybook" of paper stapled together by George Oppen circa 1964, he There is the area of Lyric—the
area in which one is absolutely
convinced that one's emotions
are an insight into reality

and death
But values—as they say— —at a Dominican picnic, one summer back when there were only four of us, we sat on a blanket watching the band. Stacey gets up and walks away and a woman sitting with her kids and four—maybe?—sisters turns to me smiling and asks me a question in Spanish. The other women turn to look at me. I say I don't understand. She : your wife, she speaks es-Spaneesh? Me : no, not really. And she : Is she Dominican? And me : no, she's black. The women bounce looks off each other and back to me. Kids oblivious. She : jou mean black black? Me : yes, blackblack— ' the dark colour was so dark. . . ' Ed Pavlic is associate professor of English and director of the MFA/PhD program in creative writing at the University of Georgia.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 2015

About the author

Edward M. Pavlić

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll circle back and review this more fully when I've let it sit for a while and then re-read, but the sequence of "Verbatim" poems clearly marks both an unexpected shift towards clarity in Pavlic's poetry, and a major contribution to American poetry.

[Erik Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

++
One clear night in July it stormed suddenly and I woke up and thought about my car and said fuck it and in the morning I came out to find that someone rolled up all four windows of my car. That's true. And then--and the truth is that in my mind it's the same person, which certainly says more about me than about whoever it actually was--they threw a brick thru each of the windows of my car. One brick. Four times. When I came out in the morning it was alone in the backseat. Car flooded. Me thinking: someone did all this in the rain? Or maybe it was four people, strangers to me and each other, who found in my Dodge Omni, somehow, the impulse to perform this one, intricately repetitive act?
++

[Jared Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

And again, we think it means time
but we won't deal with this in time because this time
isn't made of time it's made of us and so
we'll deal with this in us.

So again means us.

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Review: Doesn't even deserve one star, really this is what passes for poetry, an excerpt of a newspaper???


VERBATIM BREAKING NEWS: MARCH 25, 2011



‘On the waste, beneath the sky…’

They caught him yesterday night. During the NCAA Tournament
game on CBS. He called the Athens Police, Georgia. Said he wanted
to turn himself in and that he had 8 hostages and that he wanted to
surrender on live television so that if they shot him down trying to
surrender everyone would see it. It’s pretty clear he shot the two police
officers. It’s definite that one of them is dead and the other is going to
survive the gunshots on his face and shoulder. It’s unclear if Ohio State
can beat Kentucky, and it’s been clear to me for years that advertising
sold to sporting events is designed to make men partially numb and to
make them despise the parts of themselves that aren’t.

In ways related to some or none of this, there’s dense weather in my
House tonight.

[Josiah Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concrete images, prose poetry, language poetry and relevant topics that focus on current references that give an account of the author with stark scenes and blunt emotions. I will probably give this a 5 star review upon my second read.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

topically intense

[Books the cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful meditations on the complexities of subjectivity, nationality, race, and fatherhood. And incisive stylizations that cut and mend through those complexities. Worth reading.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the privilege of hearing Ed Pavlić read at Hollins University last year and was blown away by the honest and lyrical experience that it was. This book, although including portions of prose (prose poems?) that are straightforward, is also a testament to Pavlić's ability to play with the abstract. It is a book that draws heavily upon traditions of jazz, racialized American experiences, and the concept of space. I devoured this book and hope to read his other works soon.