A Field of Telephones

by Zach Savich

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.

184 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2025

Reviews

[Judah · Rating 2 out of 5]

“I guess my philosophy is you run until you feel the leash and then you joke your head is smaller than your neck… slip through… do you ever wonder if it’s easier to make your head smaller or your neck larger… why not both… do you ever feel like you’re at the end of your rope… think how the rope feels.”

listen i would love to give this a higher rating because i very much enjoy the memoir-y sections and the hugo sections, but the lectures are miserable. they’re so long and frankly very hard to follow if you don’t know the allusions being made. i do wonder how this was made accessible to the audience in that regard and if set/visuals assisted, but the lack of stage directions leaves you to just sort of guess. i’m interested in more by this author but this wasn’t very successful for me.