The Firestorm

Author: Zach Savich

Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2011)

"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 fulguration, 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