"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.

The first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich's full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships 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.

Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlic's Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song. Pavlic's collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end. Kate's shadow hovers like a penumbra over these pages that unfold a kaleidoscope of her world. A small-town apartment full of "paintings & burritos & pyramid-shaped empty bottles of Patron & an ad hoc anthology of vibrators." A banged-up Jeep, loose syringes underfoot, rattles under Colorado skies. Near an ICU bed, Pavlic agonizes over the most difficult questions, while doctors "swish off to the tune of their thin-soled leather loafers." And a diary, left behind, brims with revelations of vulnerability nearly as great as Pavlic's own. But Call It in the Air records more than a relationship between brother and sister, more than a moment of personal loss. "I sit while eleven bodies of mine fall all over the countless mysteries of who you are," he writes, while "Somewhere along the way, heat blasting past us & out the open jeep, the mountain sky turned to black steel & swung open its empty mouth." In moments like these, Pavlic recognizes something of his big sister everywhere. Rived by loss and ravaged by grief, Call It in the Air mingles the voices of brother and sister, one falling and one forgiven, to offer an intimate elegy that meditates on love itself.

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 Pavlic 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&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, Pavlic 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.

“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.

The first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich’s full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships   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 Pavlić 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, Pavlić 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 Pavlić’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, Pavlić 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.� Pavlić 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. Pavlić 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.   

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.

"Mr. Pavlic has listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic form but allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories. He is, doubtless, aware of such theories, but the voices in his poems flow from a denser space, having penetrated a denser reality, returning via the imagination and its many discontents. In many of them, music and its creation/performance are metaphorized into human relationships. This is intimate and soulful work, breathing, brushing, or tonguing its instrument." --Adrienne Rich