“I am incapable of succinctly praising this poet’s immense talent.” —TERRANCE HAYES
Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are 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?
Selected for the National Poetry Series by Dan Beachy-Quick, Ed Pavlic’s Visiting Hours at the Color Line 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 daring prose poems to powerful free verse, Pavlic’s lines are musically infused, bearing tones of soul, R & B, and jazz. They link the influence of James Baldwin with a postmodern consciousness descended from Samuel Beckett, tracking the experiences of American characters through situations both mundane and momentous. The resulting poems are intense, ambitious, and psychological, making Visiting Hours at the Color Line a poetic tour de force.
Praise for Visiting Hours at the Color Line
“These remarkable poems are in conversation with us: our culture, our history, our ghosts. 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
“To fully enjoy the sweet complexity and gravity-defying genre blending in 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 Ed Pavlic's 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.”
—Major Jackson
“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.”
—Hilton Als
“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
Praise for Ed Pavlic
"Ed Pavlic's poems are rituals for awareness. A stunning contribution to international literature."
—Nathalie Handal
"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. The body of his work is a kind of musical instrument: horn-guitar-percussion-words. Like jazz he wants to be without notaion, but he is a poet, stuck with language, various cultures that have caught his attention. And reading him is a theatrical experience."
—Stanley Moss
"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. Dialogic, dangerous, this is a poetics of body and soul, music to listen to with all five senses."
—Adrienne Rich
Ed Pavlic is the author of five previous books, including Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway and Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue. His awards include The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, among others. In 2012, he was a fellow at Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Institute. Pavlic teaches at the Universiy of Georgia and lives in Athens.
