Call It in the Air: Poems

by Ed Pavlić

Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song. Pavlić’s collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end. Kate’s shadow hovers like a penumbra over these pages that unfold a kaleidoscope of her world. A small-town apartment full of “paintings & burritos & pyramid-shaped empty bottles of Patron & an ad hoc anthology of vibrators.” A banged-up Jeep, loose syringes underfoot, rattles under Colorado skies. Near an ICU bed, Pavlić agonizes over the most difficult questions, while doctors “swish off to the tune of their thin-soled leather loafers.” And a diary, left behind, brims with revelations of vulnerability nearly as great as Pavlić’s own. But Call It in the Air records more than a relationship between brother and sister, more than a moment of personal loss. “I sit while eleven bodies of mine fall all over the countless mysteries of who you are,” he writes, while “Somewhere along the way, heat blasting past us & out the open jeep, the mountain sky turned to black steel & swung open its empty mouth.” In moments like these, Pavlić recognizes something of his big sister everywhere. Rived by loss and ravaged by grief, Call It in the Air mingles the voices of brother and sister, one falling and one forgiven, to offer an intimate elegy that meditates on love itself.  

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2022

About the author

Edward M. Pavlić

Reviews

[Eli]

Too personal to award stars

[Carey Calvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a rendering.

“Untitled,” Kate Pavlich, Undated adorns Ed Pavlic’s latest poetry collection, which is as searching, intimate, and wrenching, as its cover.

After reading Pavlic’s novel, Another Kind of Madness (Milkweed, March 2019), I knew there would be an exploration of tone, solitude, and a purring of souls bound in relation to something larger.

I did not expect as innocuous a title to contain such bittersweet.

Call it in the Air is “elegiac and genre-bending” – I don’t believe there’s anything Pavlic has written that isn’t genre-bending. His ability to subsume multiple characterizations within a structured framework always makes for provocative and insightful reading.

Call it in the Air is at once prismatic, “the eye that opalesces,” narrative, and mystery, yet always poetic. 

“There’s art each day.”

“I used to believe that images worked like damp sponges, drew from experiences, and gave it texture.”

Call it in the Air is also an exploration of family dysfunction writ subtle and large, its implications clouding and illuminating.

Pavlic exhumes Hart Crane in a letter Crane wrote in 1927: “You think that experience is some commodity that can be sought. One can respond only to certain circumstances, just what the barriers are, and where the boundaries cross can never be completely broken.”

But Pavlic’s love for his sister is also expressed in visits to ICU and flashbacks to a simpler, and in retrospect, a more somber and telling time.

“In your eyes I could see the terror of the night, pure as a sable coat filled with smoke.”

Somewhere between memoir and elegy.

She’s not going home from here.

[Michelle Engel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The pieces in this collection speak to a deep if very complicated familial love. Raw and powerful, beautiful and tragic by turns, Call It in the Air takes you on a non-chronological journey.

These fragments of memory, connected thematically but revisited out of their literal place and time, evoke the ways in which grief reshapes recollection.

It reads both like something lost and something newly-created from the wound, the displacement.