Call It in the Air

Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavli's Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.

Pavli's collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end. Kate's shadow hovers like a penumbra over these pages that unfold a kaleidoscope of her world. A small-town apartment full of "paintings burritos pyramid-shaped empty bottles of Patron an ad hoc anthology of vibrators." A banged-up Jeep, loose syringes underfoot, rattles under Colorado skies. Near an ICU bed, Pavli agonizes over the most difficult questions, while doctors "swish off to the tune of their thin-soled leather loafers." And a diary, left behind, brims with revelations of vulnerability nearly as great as Pavli's own.But Call It in the Air records more than a relationship between brother and sister, more than a moment...