Live at the Bitter End
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Recasting the “trial of the century,” Ed Pavli ’s vertiginous new collection puts a century of segregation on trial for its soulSet 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and academic Pavli (Who Can Afford to Improvise?) refracts an array of historical and modern voices of musicians, performers, composers, and artists through the frame of a racialized trial in this collection of elliptical lyrics. The narrative moves the reader through a history that dances in its own violent music, though the individual stories of its inhabitants slip away as they come closer into focus: "we/ clocked the pulse of footprints fossilized/ in broken glass we gave chase but didn't know/ whether to taste the toll or pay off the tongue." Attentive to the dialogue of snatched conversations, these poems demand a kind of listening that counterpoises the pleasure of the sound and breath with "White hands of pain without edge. White hours/ after sundown with no bottom." The book revels in the construction of its clever fragments and the wit of its juxtapositions, asserting that "You/ glimpsed movements that remained, you didn't want to see." Though the work can be frustrating at times, collectively these poems simultaneously ask for and refuse witness of "the fine line between live flesh & dead meat." Pavli leaves his readers with a dreamlike imprint, an approximation of the real conversation that must be had.
