Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno

Pavli%C4%87 (Who Can Afford to Improvise?), two-time winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition, blends memoir and lyric in this genre-bending collection, fearlessly exploring the personal and political boundaries of race, history, and heritage. In the multi-page prose poem "Verbatim Breaking News: March 25, 2011," Pavli%C4%87 arrives at questions of privilege and responsibility against the backdrop of police brutality in America, linking news stories and personal experiences with short excerpts from the addenda to Samuel Beckett's novel Watt. Another of the long-form offerings, "Verbatim Palestine: June 3, 2014," presents a landscape of the "ricochets and the echoes" of Palestinian and Israeli life and conflict that Pavli%C4%87's speaker experiences while traveling through the West Bank. Yet Pavli%C4%87's political eye never turns into an objectifying gaze%E2%80%94instead it returns to the self as a site of investigation, and in particular to his family's homeland of Croatia. Pavli%C4%87's wife and son are never far either, and it is the willingness to question his own life that makes Pavli%C4%87's gestures outward feel so powerful for the reader: "and I hate that feeling of already knowing in myself which is why I write%E2%80%94to replace the lie of the already known." (Oct.)