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Zach Savich instructs us that even the attempt to define what poetry actually does lies “beyond assimilation” and, perhaps, like consciousness itself, defies limits. Poem as sound enters the body not only as meaning but as something physical, transforming whatever it comes upon. Similar to the cinder path of the title, the road to understanding can be rough yet porous; words found on the page offer the residue of extreme combustion. A collage of poetic and experiential encounters, Savich’s études are not only a meditation on poetry but the spacious engagement with an expansive mind. —Samuel Ace
Zach Savich reminds us that surprise is a kind of insight in this exquisite, looping essay in pursuit of the “porous image.” Wound with a eulogy for his sister, who “colored hard through the page to make the birds fly,” Etudes for the Image tracks the efficient inner visioning poets have long been after. “What kind of ladder is poetry today?” he asks, trailing images by Miller, Giscombe, Carr, Hejinian, Snyder, and Zukofsky. The scientists who study surprise can’t recreate or ruin it, but they have much to learn from Savich whose images know how to “brush the dog another way,” “play the instant steadily behind the beat,” and linger in the evasive “irresolvable chord.” —Sarah Minor