About the Author

Professor of English and Creative Writing, Ed Pavlic's newest books are Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015) and 'Who Can Afford to Improvise?': James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (Fordham University Press, 2015). Recent works are Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009, Kwani? Trust, 2013) and Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (U Georgia P, 2008). His other books are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon, 2001), Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minnesota Press, 2002), and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE/Sheep Meadow Press, 2006).

Reviews

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