Let It Be Broke

The poems in Ed Pavlic’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 cafe–that spark a journey into personal and ontological questions. Pavlic’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, Pavlic 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.