This moving collection of prose poems about seventies soul singer Donny Hathaway 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. Among mainstream audiences Hathaway is perhaps best known either as the syrupy voice singing with Roberta Flack in "Where Is the Love" or for his shocking death―he was found dead beneath the open thirteenth-story window of his New York hotel room in 1979 at the age of thirty-three. Less well known are the depth of his classical and gospel training, his wide-ranging intellectual interests, and the respect his musical knowledge, talent, and versatility commanded from collaborators like Curtis Mayfield and Aretha Franklin. Meanwhile, among listeners with special affinity for soul music of the 1970s, even almost thirty years after his death, no voice burns with the intensity of Hathaway's own in the great solo ballads and freedom songs such as "A Song for You," "Giving Up," "Someday We'll All Be Free," and "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black." Winners Have Yet to Be Announced pushes poetry toward the rich characterization and depth of a novel. Yet it is the capacity of poetic language that allows the book to examine Donny Hathaway's vivid and remarkable life without attempting to resolve the mysteries within which he lived and created and sang.

Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway

Literature & Fiction

Pavlić, Ed

Poetry

University of Georgia Press

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&amp;B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin’s passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and musicians.
Presented in three books ― or movements ― the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. It introduces the key terms of his lyrical aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of Baldwin’s career from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning journals in the 1940s to his last published and unpublished works from the mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, singers whose message and methods were closely related to his developing world view. It concludes with the first detailed account of “The Hallelujah Chorus,” a performance from July 1, 1973, in which Baldwin shared the stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles. Finally, in Book III, Pavlić reverses our musically inflected reconsideration of Baldwin’s voice, projecting it into the contemporary moment and reading its impact on everything from the music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances of Turf Feinz, and the fire of racial oppression and militarization against black Americans in the 21st century.
Always with an ear close to the music, and avoiding the safe box of celebration, Who Can Afford to Improvise? enables a new kind of “lyrical travel” with the instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery Baldwin’s work invokes into the world.

Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners

History & Criticism

Fordham University Press

APR First Book Prize winner. Energetic language and mature presence mark this beautiful, disturbing debut.

Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

American Poetry Review

Set in the vernacular origins of modernity, Live at the Bitter End puts the racialized logic of 20th century aesthetics on trial. Mixing anonymous voices with the testimonies of figures such as Paul Cézanne, Charles Mingus, Emma Bardac, Erik Satie, Alberto Giacometti, Billie Holiday, Pierre Bonnard, Samuel Beckett, Miles Davis, and others, Ed Pavli weaves a playfully raucous and intimately violent work of satirical force. Adhering to the structure of a murder trial, Live at the Bitter End bears lyrical witness to racial separation, masquerade, mongrelization, and communion to show how those connections (in love, lust, trust and betrayal) sound deep in the textures of who we are.

Live at the Bitter End

Humor & Satire

Saturnalia Books

The first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich's full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships &nbsp; Adrienne Rich is best known as a feminist poet and activist. This iconic status owes especially to her work during the 1970s, while the distinctive political and social visions she achieved during the second half of her career remain inadequately understood. In Outward, poet, scholar, and novelist Ed Pavlic considers Rich's entire oeuvre to argue that her most profound contribution in poems is her emphasis on not only what goes on "within us" but also what goes on "between us." Guided by this insight, Pavlic shows how Rich's most radical work depicts our lives--from the public to the intimate--in shared space rather than in owned privacy. Informed by Pavlic's friendship and correspondence with Rich, Outward explores how her poems position visionary possibilities to contend with cruelty and violence in our world. Employing an innovative framework, Pavlic examines five kinds of solitude reflected in Rich's poems: relational solitude, social solitude, fugitive solitude, dissident solitude, and radical solitude. He traces the importance of relationships to her early writing before turning to Rich's explicitly antiracist and anticapitalist work in the 1980s, which culminates with her most extensive sequence, "An Atlas of the Difficult World." Pavlic concludes by examining the poet's twenty-first century work and its depiction of relationships that defy historical divisions based on region, race, class, gender, and sexuality. A deftly written engagement in which one poet works within the poems of another, Outward reveals the development of a major feminist thinker in successive phases as Rich furthers her intimate and erotic, social and political reach. Pavlic illuminates Rich's belief that social divisions and the power of capital inform but must never fully script our identities or our relationships to each other.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Outward: Adrienne Rich's Expanding Solitudes

Univ. of Minnesota Press

The first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich's full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships &nbsp; Adrienne Rich is best known as a feminist poet and activist. This iconic status owes especially to her work during the 1970s, while the distinctive political and social visions she achieved during the second half of her career remain inadequately understood. In Outward, poet, scholar, and novelist Ed Pavli? considers Rich's entire oeuvre to argue that her most profound contribution in poems is her emphasis on not only what goes on "within us" but also what goes on "between us." Guided by this insight, Pavli? shows how Rich's most radical work depicts our lives--from the public to the intimate--in shared space rather than in owned privacy. Informed by Pavli?'s friendship and correspondence with Rich, Outward explores how her poems position visionary possibilities to contend with cruelty and violence in our world. Employing an innovative framework, Pavli? examines five kinds of solitude reflected in Rich's poems: relational solitude, social solitude, fugitive solitude, dissident solitude, and radical solitude. He traces the importance of relationships to her early writing before turning to Rich's explicitly antiracist and anticapitalist work in the 1980s, which culminates with her most extensive sequence, "An Atlas of the Difficult World." Pavli? concludes by examining the poet's twenty-first century work and its depiction of relationships that defy historical divisions based on region, race, class, gender, and sexuality. A deftly written engagement in which one poet works within the poems of another, Outward reveals the development of a major feminist thinker in successive phases as Rich furthers her intimate and erotic, social and political reach. Pavli? illuminates Rich's belief that social divisions and the power of capital inform but must never fully script our identities or our relationships to each other.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes

Another Kind of Madness: A Novel

Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite: Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future. A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.

United States

MILKWEED EDITIONS *

“A full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound.” ―KIESE LAYMON Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite: Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future. A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.

Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are assigned a bifurcated public narrative. We divide historical and cultural life into two camps, often segregated by a politicized, racially divided "Color Line." But how do we privately experience the most troubling features of American civilization? Where is the Color Line in the mind, in the body, between bodies, between human beings? Ed Pavlic's Visiting Hours at the Color Line, a 2012 National Poetry Series winner, attempts to complicate this black-and-white, straight-line feature of our collective imagination, and to map its nonlinear, deeply colored timbres and hues. From the daring prose poem to the powerful free verse, Pavlic's lines are musically infused, bearing tones of soul, R&amp;B, and jazz. Meanwhile, joining the influence of James Baldwin with a postmodern consciousness the likes of Samuel Beckett, Pavlic tracks the experiences of American characters through situations both mundane and momentous, and exposes the many textures of this social, historical world as it seeps into the private dimensions of our lives. The resulting poems are intense—at times even violent—ambitious, and psychological, making Visiting Hours at the Color Line a poetic tour de force, by one of the century's most acclaimed American poets.

Visiting Hours at the Color Line: Poems (National Poetry Series)

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Books by Pavlić, Ed

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pavlić, Ed. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway

Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners

Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners

Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

Live at the Bitter End

Outward: Adrienne Rich's Expanding Solitudes

Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes

Another Kind of Madness: A Novel

Another Kind of Madness: A Novel

Visiting Hours at the Color Line: Poems (National Poetry Series)