Call It in the Air

“Pavli​​ć offers a vulnerable, visceral portrait of life and grief.”

“Pavli​​ć’s Call It In The Air is a stunning meditation on grief, told in a suspension of prose poems spreading from the 1970s on until present day….Tenderness can be seen throughout Pavli​​ć’s writing, which is pure and straightforward, pulling no punches. Pavli​​ć does not hide behind flowery writing or extreme extended metaphors. This is the powerful writing of grief, the lines and forms strong and clear.”

“We talk so much about permission, but seldom do we talk about soulful persuasion. More than any book I’ve read this decade, Call It in the Air pushed me to accept the absolute experience of grief, in all its abundance. Pavlic at first appears to do the heavy work of grief and assemblage for us, but he does more than that; he holds us slightly as he asks us to name what we see as we float, fall and flee. Call It in the Air is simply one of the greatest elegies I have ever read.”

“Call It in the Air is an intimate record of grief and turmoil within family, sister, and self. Their voices cut across time and geography, from the early 1970s to the present, from ‘Near Buena Vista, CO’ to ‘Denver I.C.U.’ to ‘Salida, CO,’ and out along ‘I-80 E,’ forming a cartography of pain and failing body—eyes, liver, kidneys, feet, hands, and ‘nails black from the inside-out with blood.’ As he traverses between place and memory, his dying sister and himself, Ed Pavlić paints an intensely beautiful self-portrait: ‘I sit with a tissue, dizzy-ready.’ Ed Pavlić and Kate Pavlich: eternally bound by a love ‘misspelled.’”

“At the center of Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air is a profoundly honest and deeply loving account of a brother’s bottomless grief. In language that is at once haunted and haunting, vivid and vulnerable, this book reconciles the darkest shadows of our memory with the light those we love leave behind.”