Call It in the Air: Poems

(Paperback)

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Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlis Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.

Pavlis collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end. Kates 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, Pavli 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 Pavlis 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, Pavli 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.

Reviews

Praise for Call It in the Air

Pavlis elegiac, genre-bending work considers the life and death of his elder sister, Kate, questions whether individuals can ever understand each other, and writes into and against the stronghold of personal loss and grief.Publishers Weekly, Top Ten for Fall 2022

Pavli offers a vulnerable, visceral portrait of life and grief.Publishers Weekly

"We talk so much about permission, but seldom do we talk about soulful persuasion. More than any book I've read this decade, Call It in the Air pushed me to accept the absolute experience of grief, in all its abundance. Pavli at first appears to do the heavy work of grief and assemblage for us, but he does more than that; he holds us slightly as he asks us to name what we see as we float, fall, and flee. Call It in the Air is simply one of the greatest elegies I have ever read."Kiese Laymon

Call It in the Air is an intimate record of grief and turmoil within family, sister, and self. Their voices cut across time and geography, from the early 1970s to the present, from Near Buena Vista, CO to Denver I.C.U. to Salida, CO, and out along I-80 E, forming a cartography of pain and failing bodyeyes, liver, kidneys, feet, hands, and nails black from the inside-out with blood. As he traverses between place and memory, his dying sister and himself, Ed Pavlipaints an intensely beautiful self-portrait: I sit with a tissue, dizzy-ready. Ed Pavli and Kate Pavlich: eternally bound by a love misspelled.Don Mee Choi

At the center of Ed PavlisCall It in the Airis a profoundly honest and deeply loving account of a brothers bottomless grief. In language that is at once haunted and haunting, vivid and vulnerable, this book reconciles the darkest shadows of our memory with the light those we love leave behind.Lacy M. Johnson

Praise for Another Kind of Madness

The pleasure of music and ache of language drive [Pavlis] first novel . . . Characters feed off one another like improvisatory musicians, and, like Finnegans Wake, the book begins at the end and ends just before the beginning. Minneapolis Star Tribune

An ode to Chicago, Kenya, and soul music as humanitys worldwide hum . . . In Ed Pavlis remarkable and groundbreaking novel, Another Kind of Madness, literary tropes and images are pried loose. Colorado Review

[A] beautiful debut novel . . . Pavlis prose is simple yet lyrical, which strikingly depicts not only the intricacies of Ndiya and Shames relationship, but also a city and its history, as seen through architectural turnover and musical evolution. This is a moving novel about two people finding the strength to move forward together. Publishers Weekly

Pavli delivers a soulful debut novel about love and restoring hope. . . . In prose by turns lyrical and mesmerizing, Pavli taps deeply into what it means to be Black in America, tossing in some surprising narrative tricks along the way. Booklist

This remarkable project, with its lyrical play and experimental structure, shrinks the moment between event and emotionas well as the distance between text and experiencedown to a dot. Africa is a Country

Ed Pavlis Another Kind of Madness is a full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound. Pavli guides his language and characters into holes, onto planes, and through doors Ive never read or imagined. Pavlis narrative audacity and descriptive skill make every sentence and scene in Another Kind of Madness equal parts sorrow song, blues, funk, and of course jazz. Ive not read a novel in recent history that so absolutely blurs, bruises, and complicates the space between mourning and morning. I am wonderfully devastated by the soul, scope, and execution of Another Kind of Madness and thoroughly inspired by this new kind of novel that is as at once wholly innovative and in deep conversation with so many Black American literary traditions.Kiese Laymon, author of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

Reader beware. You imagine you hold a book in your hands, but it is a song, a rhythm of words and phrases that shudder the soul. You will wander with its wanderers, and every few minutes you will need to put the book down to hear again what you have just read. It is not enough that Chicago, Lamu Townmidwestern American, coastal Kenyaand other worlds shift and shimmer and suck you into the madness the book proposes, but you will depart the text with its lyrics ringing in your heart.Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust

A fiercely vibrant meditation on how the interior life that eludes us returns through the sounds, secrets, and graces of others, through which Ed Pavli rekindles, in his inimitable way, the meanings of lyric and soul.Emily J. Lordi, author of Black Resonance

Like a song that lingers in memory, Another Kind of Madness offers us a narrative that both moves and refuses to move, that leaps and at times seems to vanish. By this lyrical rhythm, Ed Pavli defines diaspora as here but also everywhere and nowhere. In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but cant find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank

Another Kind of Madness is a deliriously gorgeous novel. It is both hallucinatory and cogent, both African and Western, both stormy and gentle, and painted with a language that vibrates the bones. Ed Pavli, whether were talking poetry or prose, is a master vernacularist, an adept cartographer of the human heart, and an artist with such subtle observational dexterity that one might imagine hes directly in touch with the sublime.Reginald McKnight, author of He Sleeps

Author Bio

Ed Pavli is the author of Call It in the Air and Visiting Hours at the Color Line, as well as a novel, Another Kind of Madness. His other books, written across and between genres, include, most recently, Outward: Adrienne Richs Expanding Solitudes and the collection of poems Let It Be Broke. He lives in Athens, Georgia, where he works as Distinguished Research Professor of English, African American studies, and creative writing at the University of Georgia.