Momently

by Zach Savich

Dandelion fences, twine wires, shoebox Savich’s fanciful, stark meditations showcase the momentary and the momentous.
Momently is a collection of meditative but probing poems that ask questions of the tangible and the ephemeral, in which the every day is given a new weight. The celebrated poet's latest collection deepens his exploration of the delicate and the durable, of entropy and its remainders, offering an "ethics of deciding to see." 
Momently stays alert to "the language you can stand when you can't stand language," cultivating insights and instances that may sustain us "here, where not even ruin lasts."

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

Published March 5, 2024

Reviews

[Nicholas Trandahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Savich’s triple-stanza prose poems of “Momently” feel like self-contained lives. Like his work in “Daybed”, these poems read like sedimentary fragments coalesced into a clastic form of engaging curiosity. Savich is a postmodern abstractionist hunter-gatherer, a harvester of moments belonging to passing existences.

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bees. Blossoms. Sheet metal. Ladders. These breathless, surrealist prose poems are preoccupied with mortality, the creative life, ephemerality, and nature. Savich's omission of punctuation and capitalization allows the sentences to be read many different ways, a tricky balancing act he pulls off well. His sense of prosody and imagery is admirable. His history as a cancer survivor often comes through in the intimacy this collection takes with death: "dying will remember me" ("poems for future anniversaries"). My favorite poems were "sour," "sinew," and "scrap diamond."