Böcker av Ed Pavlic

A collection of prose poems about seventies soul singer Donny Hathaway that presents a complex view of a gifted artist through imagined conversations and interviews that convey the voices, surroundings, and clashing dimensions of Hathaway's life.

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.

How can the speculative imagination help us build a better world?At a world-historical moment of global upheaval, speculative writing is enjoying a renaissance. This collection of poetry, stories, and essays engages speculation as both a ubiquitous feature of financial capitalism and a radical tool of collective imagination. By rejecting dominant ideas about what is possible, speculation empowers us to plot new paths to a more just world.Creative works range over violence and healing, memory and erasure, and alternative worlds, while essays span the meaning of land and community in the African diaspora, Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, and the ethics of the far future. Taken together, these works suggest that speculation is ultimately about our relationships with each other—as one contributor puts it, "what they have been, what they are, and most important, what they could be."

Some of today''s most imaginative writers consider what it means to be made and fashioned by others.It is rare now for people to stay where they were raised, and when we encounter one another--whether in person or, increasingly, online--it is usually in contexts that obscure if not outright hide details about our past. But even in moments of pure self-invention, we are always shaped by the past. In Ancestors, some of today''s most imaginative writers consider what it means to be made and fashioned by others. Are we shaped by grandparents, family, the deep past, political forebears, inherited social and economic circumstances? Can we choose our family, or is blood always thicker? And looking forward, what will it mean to be ancestors ourselves, and how will our descendants remember us?ContributorsBennet Bergman, Sam Bett, Tyree Daye, Diamond Forde, Duana Fullwiley, José B. González, Racquel Goodison, Terrance Hayes, Day Heisinger-Nixon, Tyehimba Jess, Christina Knight, Emily Lordi, Vuyelwa Maluleke, Reginald McKnight, Cheswayo Mphanza, Achal Prabhala, Domenica Ruta, Metta Sáma, Sonia Sanchez, Izumi Suzuki, Deborah Taffa, Kyoko Uchida, Ocean Vuong, Binyavanga Wainaina, Yeoh Jo-Ann, Felicia Zamora

Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet's skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? retraces the full arc of James Baldwin's passage across the pages and stages of his career amplifying our sense of his contemporary relevance.