Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book.
In her introduction Adrienne Rich describes Paraph of Bone & Other
Kinds of Blue, as a fully conceived book, speaking as a whole from the
first lines to the last... Mr. Pavlic has listened closely to our most
profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only
helped him achieve poetic form but allowed him to explore a mesh of
experience extraneous to literary theories... This is intimate and
soulful work, breathing, brushing, and tonguing its instrument.
In response to Charlie Parker's theory of art, If you don't live it, it
won't come out of your horn, Ed Pavlic breathes exuberant life into his
poetry through rigorous attention to overlapping facets of
language--visual, tonal, rhythmic.
from Confessions of a Piano Roll Lover:
& this new player,
he's just a boy. Well
drilled,
won't allow his thumb
to drag behind his
index
finger. Mistakes won't leave
exit wounds, or
bloom
in his lapel until
they're his alone. Grown.
With a pocket
Full of rock salt
in his gait, & jalapeño
beard.
Ed Pavlic received his BA and MA from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and a PhD from Indiana University. He currently teach
in the English Department at Union College in Schenectady, NY. His work
has appeared in African American Review, Doubletake, The Black Warrior
Review and elsewhere. His critical book, Crossroads Modernism: Descent
and Emergence in African American Modernism is forthcoming in 2002. He
lives in Schenectady, NY.
