Call It in the Air: Poems

by Ed Pavlic

Overview

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.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571315489
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/11/2022
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

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 Universityof Georgia.

Read an Excerpt

Ca. 1972. The night’s a blue spruce in my room   Dawn in my bed comes on green & silver in my mouth   You come in various ways   You come in the middle of a dream to tell me about girls who eat their brothers   You tell me you have a friend no one knows about   She’s white as chalk   Veins slide across her bones like a tongue moves in moonlight   You tell me to picture it   Thin blue worms under my skin   She lives at the Ledge in the woods & helps women run away from the state prison

Ca. 1972. A summer night feels like it feels when I wake to the golden ends of your hair along the slope of my spine. A summer night feels like it buried my breath hot into the cool pillow. Your breath on the back of my arm. A summer night feels like it feels to the first hands in the room on my walking stick’s worth of a nude undercovers body. You sing  There’s no time to hold a spark. You say   Hurry up dreary deary you have to learn where to touch yourself before you blink & disappear in the dark

Salida, CO. The roof of your jeep must be up on the mountainside near the tree line in Tim’s garage. We’re not going back for it. The night before we go to the Angel, we drive up to Leadville and back looking for orange and blue thread you need for something you have to do immediately. A custom-made margarita in a stainless coffee mug in your hand: “I told him it needed more Grand Marnier.” I drove. Somewhere along the way, heat blasting past us & out the open jeep, the mountain sky turned to black steel & swung open its empty mouth. The line of your face pushed against the tongue of the night. The air tastes blue & plays our heads like cold flame. The dark line of your face pushes into bright black steel. A shut-eyed face hidden by a night wing. A serrated song with a split tongue of onyx feathers.

Ca. 1975. When you were fourteen I was eight. Somehow Mom and Dad learned where you were living. I remember hearing it: “Steamboat Springs, Colorado?! Get a map.” They called the police. They wanted you home. The police pin-pointed you. They picked you up and put you in jail. Dad came from a job somewhere, and you cursed him thru clenched teeth on the flight home. I remember, terrified of you, hiding upstairs while you hissed at our house as if it were prison. “You called the fucking cops on me?”

Rain in reverse. I remember one sentence from your return to us. Did I say I was stuck-to-the-wall terrified of you? You whispered low thru a smile like a straight razor on a strop, over and over at dinner: “You can’t keep me here if I want to leave.” I remember feeling like you’d etched the sentence in the air with fingernails full of flesh carved out of your arms. You were right. You were gone in a week. A month? All I remember is that one sentence of your hissing & evil teenage flesh hanging there before my eyes, the only living thing in the terrified room. The sound of flesh that’s declared itself uncaged. I can taste that sentence whenever I want. It’s under my tongue. It tastes like sweat off clean brass. Like adrenaline.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Call It in the Air

“Pavlić’s 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​​ć 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. Pavlić 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 body—eyes, 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 Pavlić paints an intensely beautiful self-portrait: ‘I sit with a tissue, dizzy-ready.’ Ed Pavlić and Kate Pavlich: eternally bound by a love ‘misspelled.’” —Don Mee Choi

“At the center of Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air is a profoundly honest and deeply loving account of a brother’s 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 [Pavlić’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

From the Publisher