Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Art. "I want to write you a beautiful book of prose, against not least the before-too-long loss of tongue and sense and all sun-defiant hues on the river bend, and none of us able to say or touch or see, soon enough, soon enough, aground, to give you this my voice today nevertheless, withstanding, nevertheless, given everything, for you, a clear note from a complicated bell," begins Zach Savich in his first book of prose. He goes on to compose a powerful, precise, and playfully chaotic book-length lyric memoir on art, process, friendship, place, and imagination.

Events Film Cannot Withstand

Literature & Fiction

Savich, Zach

History & Criticism

Rescue Press

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP is a memoir about cancer, teaching, and poetic friendship. Alternately wise and wild, humorous and moving, Savich writes of illness and illness narratives, the present moment, pain, memory, desire, and poetry's oft-debated capacity to matter: "Justify why you have an eye. How come nursery rhymes, how come tulips and clouds, fear and bread, insight without immediate application." In the tradition of previous poet-teacher treatises—Mary Ruefle's MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY, Richard Hugo's Triggering Town—this book's inquiry embraces the reader as correspondent, collaborator, and confidant. DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP, Savich's second book of nonfiction, is a huge-hearted, riotous memoir—one that will inspire those who love poetry and those who hate it toward further escalation, care, and entanglement. "I have heard it said that a spiritual practice is just that, practice, for use when your crisis comes. You can call upon it then, and it ought to be answerable to that call. Laid bare here and put to the test is one writer's extraordinarily developed practice of reading, as well as his related exercise of full, ardent friendship and of disinhibited personal freedom; and DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP is a powerful account of why they matter when they matter. This bodied, tender, generous, furious book-long essay discloses the imperiled life, self-led learning, and consequential living, that have made Zach Savich better than any poet of our generation at weighing the momentary and offering the present."—Brian Blanchfield "This book is radically alive. Visionary, cantankerous, lustful, generously attentive to what Agee called 'the common objects of our disregard.' Savich writes, 'My favorite concept remains the actual, despite everything.' Why settle for a life circumscribed by recieved notions of right and wrong, when you could instead live in the world, 'entangle further'? In the tradition of the great poet-teacher treatises before it... DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP gifts the reader closer contact with the world by documenting one life's devotion to art."—Lisa Wells "If everything you've ever heard said about poetry was a beautiful forest in which everyone had already dutifully documented every fir and fern, muskrat and butterfly, but no one had ever turned over a single stone on the forest floor and observed what was living on the surface of the soil out of casual notice, then reading this book is like—I know it sounds crazy—getting to breathe the earth beneath that stone."—Mark Leidner

Diving Makes the Water Deep

Merging the spirits of Don Quixote, Shakespearean fools, Theodore Roethke, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill, and the Marx Brothers, Zach Savich’s first book does more than showcase the innovative fluency of its roving forms and moods: these poetic hybrids are not hothouse blossoms but minotaurs. With ebullient intelligence and high-stakes insistence on the panic, lust, and suffering of the sensual world, Full Catastrophe Living uses the self as an instrument to investigate art, love, and the hardest honesty. In meditations, songs, slapstick sequences, sonnets, narratives, and tightly carved fragments, Savich explores the conflicts between romance and reality, between inventing a new world and staying true to this one. Relishing both traditional and experimental poetics, he takes refreshing, ecumenical risks to show the “strange grace / of bells that ring with a rag’s polishing.” Like a Fourth of July band conductor guiding planes to land, his poetic wit alters what’s real. This book will change the ways that readers think about poetry, language’s expressive capacity, and the robust world around us.

Full Catastrophe Living (Iowa Poetry Prize)

Poetry

University Of Iowa Press

Language as an embodied sense in this renowned poet’s fifth book

The Orchard Green and Every Color

Omnidawn

Poetry. "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 fulgurative, 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—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.

The Firestorm

Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Winner of the 2010 Colorado Prize for Poetry Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

Annulments (Colorado Prize for Poetry)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Alternative Medicine

Center for Literary Publishing

Poetry. "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"—Elizabeth Robinson.

The Man Who Lost His Head

Poetry. 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.

Century Swept Brutal

Genre Fiction

Black Ocean

Poetry. Through intent observation and fractured glances, the poems in DAYBED make everyday elements--yard, bicycle, sidewalk, and breeze--feel elemental. Their consideration of longing, convalescence, and the pleasures of ordinary astonishment is both environmental and emotional. Savich's dedication to attentive, restless lyricism shows what it might look like to at once "say this is heaven / and there is no heaven." DAYBED lives in that contradiction's autumnal warmth.

Daybed

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