Live at the Bitter End: A Trial by Opera

Poet and academic Pavlić (Who Can Afford to Improvise?) refracts an array of historical and modern voices of musicians, performers, composers, and artists through the frame of a racialized trial in this collection of elliptical lyrics. The narrative moves the reader through a history that dances in its own violent music, though the individual stories of its inhabitants slip away as they come closer into focus: “we/ clocked the pulse of footprints fossilized/ in broken glass we gave chase but didn’t know/ whether to taste the toll or pay off the tongue.” Attentive to the dialogue of snatched conversations, these poems demand a kind of listening that counterpoises the pleasure of the sound and breath with “White hands of pain without edge. White hours/ after sundown with no bottom.” The book revels in the construction of its clever fragments and the wit of its juxtapositions, asserting that “You/ glimpsed movements that remained, you didn’t want to see.” Though the work can be frustrating at times, collectively these poems simultaneously ask for and refuse witness of “the fine line between live flesh & dead meat.” Pavlić leaves his readers with a dreamlike imprint, an approximation of the real conversation that must be had. (Mar.)