Let It Be Broke

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 some collective deep thinking 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.”

Ed Pavlić is the author of eleven books of poetry, scholarship, fiction and non-fiction. His most recent works include Another Kind of Madness: A Novel (2019), Live at the Bitter End (2018), Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener (2016), Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno (2015) and Visiting Hours at the Color Line (2013). Author of pieces in over sixty magazines and journals, most recently the New York Times, Boston Review, Harvard Review, and Callaloo, Pavlić is twice winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition (2012 and 2015) and The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize (2001). He is Distinguished Research Professor in the English Department and in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. He lives with his family in Athens, GA.