Zach Savich - Böcker

In Zach Savich’s new collection, intent seeing makes the present more present. Here clarity is a quality not of logic, but of perception—not of description, but of the landscape itself. The mysteries of grief and joy, of daily desire and loss, resonate fleetingly, a bell struck delicately, struck again. Through his previous four volumes of poetry, Savich has embodied ways of seeing—ardent, fantastical, patient—and voiced the fugitive nature of perspective. In these new poems, language is a sense like any other and yet is everything that may be glimpsed and heard and briefly known.

Zach Savich's The Man Who Lost His Head wrestles with the irrational rationality of life as we dimly perceive it. Yet these poems elicit, like the ambiguity of life itself, our most fervent and strange fidelities. There's such a thing as a willed poetic ignorance: it forms its own epistemological haven, and these poems live in that locale. Thus the poet can ask "Does dark mean blank?" and, in the very asking, expand the horizon of possibility (that is, knowing) by which we recognize the interchangeability of absence and desire. In that dark, we grope into and through the rudiments of our own longing, "melted to its presences." When Savich writes "I suppose I do believe in nothing," his words resound as a positive statement of belief.

Zach Savich's fourth book of poetry, Century Swept Brutal, offers a rapt and restless meditation on what Oppen called “the world, weather-swept with which / one shares the century.” In a landscape of on-ramps, mysterious lakes, disgraced social studies teachers, and signs blazing between “hot” and “dog,” these poems seek out their country’s real name while exiled within it. Century Swept Brutal presents the lyrical intelligence and singular observations we have come to expect from Savich's work—but here they carry the strange complexity of fake blood made of real saliva.

Dandelion fences, twine wires, shoebox roses: Savich’s fanciful, stark meditations showcase the momentary and the momentous.Momently is a collection of meditative but probing poems that ask questions of the tangible and the ephemeral, in which the every day is given a new weight. The celebrated poet's latest collection deepens his exploration of the delicate and the durable, of entropy and its remainders, offering an "ethics of deciding to see." Momently stays alert to "the language you can stand when you can't stand language," cultivating insights and instances that may sustain us "here, where not even ruin lasts."

This critical reckoning by a celebrated poet re-envisions what scholarship can offer during times of crisis in the humanities and in our own lives. In his acclaimed 2016 book Diving Makes the Water Deep, Zach Savich wrote a memoir of cancer that was also a rowdy essay on teaching, the lyric, and poetic friendship. His urgent new book A Field of Telephones imagines new modes of criticism that can bloom beyond the university and heed the harmonics of the glitch. Through its combination of fictional lectures, performance texts, archival hijinks, and the personal, this book considers how “influence” can offer more than critical ventriloquism and how a “student” is one whose disorientations can reorient the field. Its mock-scholarly and more-than-scholarly modes focus on the life and legacy of the poets Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo and on the peril at the heart of inspiration.