"The Firestorm" by Zach Savich

CSU Poetry Center Books

Title

The Firestorm

Authors

Files

Description

Zach Savich is the author of four books of poetry, including Century Swept Brutal (Black Ocean, 2014), and a book of prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand (Rescue Press, 2011). His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Open Award, the Omnidawn chapbook Award, and other honors. He teaches in the B.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and coedits Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.

“Take Zach Savich’s The Firestorm as one proof of Emerson’s assertion that the mind’s nature is volcanic. A firestorm is such a conflagration that it produces above it its own atmosphere. And so a reader finds in Savich’s pages a super-heated cloud in which the poet’s voice grows multiple, grows active, and the poem records the intimate collisions of lines that veer from prophecy to aphorism to ribald wit to stoic speculation. If this sounds nebulous, it is not. It is figurative, lightning-like, shot through sudden flashes of experience that in the sudden afterglow reveal that experience also experiences itself. Such is the complicated place where wit turns witness, and in doing so, opens up the deeper ironies that at first glance seem quite plain: I have forgotten if I am pulling the curtain open or closed. Savich pulls the curtain open and closed, showing us again poetry’s paradoxical necessity: that the poem must show and hide at once, reveal and obscure simultaneously, and that a song that thinks makes of its melody a matter that matters.” –Dan Beachy-Quick

“What do you get when the instructions call for apples, leaves, rivers, cities, eggs, black-eyed lazy susans and a desire exceeding imagining? You get to inhabit the world only Zach Savich’s exceedingly intelligent and shapely poems have conjured up for us. I love this book. I love having poetry taking this good care of my brain.” –Dana Wier

More Information:

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The Oxonian Review