Writing about Labors Lost Left Unfinished, the new collection of poetry from Ed Pavlic, director of UGA’s MFA/Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing, noted poet Adrienne Rich said, “Mr. Pavlic has listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic form but allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories. He is, doubtless, aware of such theories, but the voices in his poems flow from a denser space, having penetrated a denser reality, returning via the imagination and its many discontents.”
Poet Yusef Komunyakaa wrote, “Labors Lost Left Unfinished perfects Ed Pavlic’s sharp eye for popular culture and history. This collection is like an alluvial fan that draws everything to a lyrical moment, to a reckoning. There’s a beauty embodied in this poet’s straightforward journey.”
Pavlic is also the author of the poetry collection Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (2001), which won The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Award. His study of African-American modernism, Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture, was published in 2002.
