Field of Telephones

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.