Savich - A Field of Telephones

A FIELD OF TELEPHONES
Zach Savich
ISBN: 979-8986581477
Price: $16
Page Count: 156
Trim Size: 5x7

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.

PRAISE

I go looking for lines in Zach Savich’s A Field of Telephones to synthesize the scope of his project, but finding the right one would boil down to a xerox of the entire text. You do not need to know Theodore Roethke—“a mind made manifold in relation to another”—to become absorbed by his obsession with the word, framed by Savich’s gratitude for the beauty of the moment. A Field of Telephones makes play of his encounters with this minor-major poet, producing vivid characters that come, go, and recur with the speed of thought itself. Savich, at some point, calls this “happiness.”

— Jess Barbagallo

Imagine Theodore Roethke were to prank-call academia from his greenhouse in the sky. Zach Savich would act as the switch to route the call into seer-reviewed criticism. A Field of Telephones spirals the lecture form into slapstick, where stage directions are cardinal and Modernism is “the great comic hippo” in the room. A variety act of the personal and the theoretical (Laughter), the Midwestern and the cosmic (Disaster), glee glitches rhyme into meaning (Poetaster), and marginalia takes centerstage (Ta-da!). Poetry’s circus is here, offering the gift of an error in your ear: “Watch out! I’m talkin’ here!” Embracing that hybrid line between experimental and experiential, Savich’s speaker desires a clocktime measured in “moments,” one that goes ping-pong instead of tick-tock, one where we stop and smell the telephones, the cellular, the satellite. If we are to “spend” life on poetry, what does its cha-ching bring, really? Pick this up. Experiment the moment. Answerve.

— Henry Goldkamp, author of Joy Buzzer: A Clown Show

If a telephone rings and no one hears, did a tree fall in the same shaggy dog story twice? A Field of Telephones is a book of rhymes and counter-rhymes, criticism and closet drama, all teetering in the same trench coat. Every action has a chain reaction: “A triggering town,” for Savich, triggers “a brigadier clown, a Frigidaire swan.” There’s no there there, there’s no air air, here’s an aye aye for an eye, highway robbery. Adjunct firefighters have well-endowed poles. This is a mind-bendingly tender lecture (plus Q&A) on Theodore Roethke, with a break for coffee and synonym bums between the poetic feet (literally - the phones and phonemes are shoes. All soles rejoice!). “Poetry is mostly tone… a dial tone… pretending to be speech…” I can’t help but hear Charles Bernstein, reciting the yellow pages: “Fence. Fence. Fence.” A Field of Telephones also isn’t not a book about cancer. Tumors rear their heads, recede, rears, recede. Yet the form itself is cancerous, but in a benign sense: sounds multiplying into ideas, associations riffing into references, alliterations ballooning. It’s “pure pun-logic, pier pin Legos, pour pine Legolas, a pioneer pineal jig.” If this is hold music, play on.

— Adrienne Raphel, author of the poetry collections Our Dark Academia and What Was It For and the nonfiction Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People who Can't Live Without Them

CONTRIBUTORS

Zach Savich is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Momently (Black Ocean, 2024), and several chapbooks, limited-edition volumes, and books of prose. His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Book Award, and other honors, including residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, ArtPark, and the Chautauqua Institution. His writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Savich teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art and serves as co-editor of Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series. He is a 2025 recipient of a fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts.