
Pavlic explores Yusef Komunyakaa's early poems, which searches for techniques that enable the kinds of shifts James Baldwin discusses in his collection of essays, The Price of the Ticket, by turning aggressively toward an exploration of psychic interiors, crafting a verse that resists conventional reasoning, and negotiating the labyrinthe nexus of surrealist and musical impulses to sculpt a version of the modernist dissociation of sensibility into versions, improvisations, of a kind of non-identical identity. As a result, Komunyakaa's poems uncover multiple new tableaux of human presence and awareness which resonate with, and combine, dimensions of experience usually held apart.