Call It in the Air - Poems

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

About the author

Ed Pavlić 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 Rich’s 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.

Summary

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, Kate: 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.  

Foreword

• Digital galley campaign, with galleys available for major media, poetry media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
• Media outreach, positioning this as an accessible book that explores grief, love, family and addiction through a narrative-driven elegy, for readers of Forrest Gander
• Select bookseller outreach, with a focus on accounts that sell poetry widely, with focus on stores in Georgia and Colorado
• Cover reveal and preorder social media campaign in collaboration with Avid in Athens, GA
• Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts, with special emphasis on academic channel for course adoption
• Virtual launch in Athens, GA

Additional text

Praise for Another Kind of Madness

 

“The pleasure of music and ache of language drive [Pavliç’s] first novel . . . Characters feed off one another like improvisatory musicians, and, like ‘Finnegan’s 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 humanity’s worldwide hum . . . In Ed Pavlić’s remarkable and groundbreaking novel, Another Kind of Madness, literary tropes and images are pried loose.” —Colorado Review

“[A] beautiful debut novel . . . Pavlić’s prose is simple yet lyrical, which strikingly depicts not only the intricacies of Ndiya and Shame’s 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

“Pavlić delivers a soulful debut novel about love and restoring hope. . . . In prose by turns lyrical and mesmerizing, Pavlić 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 emotion—as well as the distance between text and experience—down to a dot.” —Africa is a Country

“Ed Pavlić’s Another Kind of Madness is a full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound. Pavlić guides his language and characters into holes, onto planes, and through doors I’ve never read or imagined. Pavlić’s 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. I’ve 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 Town—midwestern American, coastal Kenya—and 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 Pavlić 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 Pavlić 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 can’t 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 Pavlić, whether we’re 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 he’s directly in touch with the sublime.”—Reginald McKnight, author of He Sleeps

Product details

• Authors: Pavli Ed, Ed Pavlic, Pavlić Ed
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.10.2022
• EAN: 9781571315489
• ISBN: 978-1-57131-548-9
• No. of pages: 96
• Illustrations: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Family, Poetry / poems by individual poets