Let It Be Broke
Ed Pavlić
Finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize.
Nominated for the 2021 Georgia Author of the Year Awards.
Received a starred review in Publishers Weekly.
Featured in Library Journal.
The poems in Ed Pavlić’s Let It Be Broke are ignited by sonic memories—from Chaka Khan on the radio to his teenaged daughter singing “Stay” at a local café—that spark a journey into personal and ontological questions. Pavlić’s lyric lines are equal parts introspection and inter-spection, a term he coins for the shared rumination that encourages a collective “deep think” about the arbitrary boundaries that perpetuate racial and geographic segregation and the power of words to transcend those differences. In an epiphanic moment, Pavlić recalls a quote shared by a former teacher as “a hammer made of written words,” and how he held “onto those words / as if they were steel bars and I was dangling over some bright black deepness.”
2016 summer equinox (police state)
revision: john donne
and the american word
brother resound ::
( father son uncle nephew )
out (the)
law
any black man’s death diminishes me
