About the Book
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&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.
About the Author :
Ed Pavlic has been awarded the Honickman First Book Prize and is a National Poetry Series award winner, in addition to receiving fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. He is the author of four previous collections of poems including, Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway. He lives in Athens, GA.
Review :
"Pavlic turns to canonical images and tropes but adds blues, jazz, jargon, and slang in a distinctly contemporary and vigorous American idiom... The final long piece, part of the series of prose poems called 'Verbatim,' is marvelous. A dialogue, more play than poem, it is playful, reminiscent of Beckett but more explicitly philosophical. By itself it makes this entire intriguing collection worthwhile." --Booklist "If we woke up one morning and there were no words around it would be because Ed Pavlic got them all and made a kaleidoscope of poetry. 'Astonishing' doesn't describe anything, I realize that, but that's what came to mind as I read through." --Washington Independent Review of Books "The abundant second-person addresses of Ed Pavlic's Visiting Hours at the Color Line signal these remarkable poems are in conversation with us: our culture, our history, our ghosts. His is a Hopkins-like sprung rhythm of, not only syntax, but edifying consciousness pulsing in a language of idiomatic lyrics and impressions. Even after enraptured multiple readings, I am incapable of succinctly praising this poet's immense talent and this new book's urgent, beautiful complexities." --Terrance Hayes "Ever since I discovered Ed Pavlic's poetry, I find myself measuring other authors against the steady stream of his voice, and the heart and politics one finds in his short and long lines--the very sound of freedom. There are two or three writers one always looks forward to reading, always, and Ed Pavlic, especially in his new book, Visiting Hours at the Color Line, is one of them." --Hilton Als "The self can seem some sinuous melody until otherness syncopates that self-sung, self-singing song. Ed Pavlic's Visiting Hour at the Color Line opens itself, poem by poem, to those interruptions of mere self that mark the awakening not only to our ethical life, but to our erotic one as well. Improvisation within a theme--be it the domestic or be it the workplace, be it history or be it the intimate now--riddles song with those discontinuities in which poetry's deepest vitality resides. Assumed orders of being dismantle as they become thrilled. Pavlic plays us this tune of falling apart so as to stay together. These poems don't prove, but play within the fundamental suspicion that ethics and erotics are one. It is a tune we need to hear: one that lulls where sleep rightly beckons, and one that wakes as exactly where it is we must be awake." --Dan Beachy-Quick "To fully enjoy the sweet complexity and gravity-defying genre blending in Pavlic's Visiting Hours at the Color Line, one has to first put aside fears of postmodern tricksterism and fake-outs, then come to believe that 'talk' happens without words. Inside his staunch, idiomatic phrasings and syntactic figurations is a heart bursting with sharp observations and a desire to read the nonverbal signs that point to and record our supreme humanity. Such poetry is deeply personal and masterfully arranged." --Major Jackson "The tension in Ed Pavlic's poems is a language-cable wrought to swing you out over unnerving spaces, let you see and hear what they really hold, and bring you back up more alive than you were before." --Adrienne Rich "There's a beauty embodied in this poet's straightforward journey." --Yusef Komunyakaa "Ed Pavlic's poetry balances itself on a tightrope of musical strings strung across a precipice between the irrational and the rational." --Stanley Moss
