What do you think?
Rate this book
Diving Makes the Water Deep
Diving Makes The Water Deep is a memoir about cancer, teaching, and poetic friendship. Alternately wise and wild, humorous and moving, Savich writes of illness and illness narratives, the present moment, pain, memory, desire, and poetry’s oft-debated capacity to matter: “Justify why you have an eye. How come nursery rhymes, how come tulips and clouds, fear and bread, insight without immediate application.” In the tradition of previous poet-teacher treatises—Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town—this book’s inquiry embraces the reader as correspondent, collaborator, and confidant. Diving Makes The Water Deep, Savich’s second book of nonfiction, is a huge-hearted, riotous memoir—one that will inspire those who love poetry and those who hate it toward further escalation, care, and entanglement.
I have heard it said that a spiritual practice is just that, practice, for use when your crisis comes. You can call upon it then, and it ought to be answerable to that call. Laid bare here and put to the test is one writer’s extraordinarily developed practice of reading, as well as his related exercise of full, ardent friendship and of disinhibited personal freedom; and Diving Makes the Water Deep is a powerful account of why they matter when they matter. This bodied, tender, generous, furious book-long essay discloses the imperiled life, self-led learning, and consequential living, that have made Zach Savich better than any poet of our generation at weighing the momentary and offering the present.
—Brian Blanchfield
This book is radically alive. Visionary, cantankerous, lustful, generously attentive to what Agee called “the common objects of our disregard.” Savich writes, “My favorite concept remains the actual, despite everything.” Why settle for a life circumscribed by recieved notions of right and wrong, when you could instead live in the world, “entangle further”? In the tradition of the great poet-teacher treatises before it… Diving Makes the Water Deep gifts the reader closer contact with the world by documenting one life’s devotion to art.
—Lisa Wells
If everything you’ve ever heard said about poetry was a beautiful forest in which everyone had already dutifully documented every fir and fern, muskrat and butterfly, but no one had ever turned over a single stone on the forest floor and observed what was living on the surface of the soil out of casual notice, then reading this book is like—I know it sounds crazy—getting to breathe the earth beneath that stone.
—Mark Leidner
Bio:
Zach Savich was born in Michigan in 1982 and grew up in Olympia, Washington. He received degrees from the Universities of Washington, Iowa, and Massachusetts. His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Open Award, and other honors. His fifth collection of poetry, The Orchard Green and Every Color, was published by Omnidawn in 2016. He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and co-edits Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.
I have heard it said that a spiritual practice is just that, practice, for use when your crisis comes. You can call upon it then, and it ought to be answerable to that call. Laid bare here and put to the test is one writer’s extraordinarily developed practice of reading, as well as his related exercise of full, ardent friendship and of disinhibited personal freedom; and Diving Makes the Water Deep is a powerful account of why they matter when they matter. This bodied, tender, generous, furious book-long essay discloses the imperiled life, self-led learning, and consequential living, that have made Zach Savich better than any poet of our generation at weighing the momentary and offering the present.
—Brian Blanchfield
This book is radically alive. Visionary, cantankerous, lustful, generously attentive to what Agee called “the common objects of our disregard.” Savich writes, “My favorite concept remains the actual, despite everything.” Why settle for a life circumscribed by recieved notions of right and wrong, when you could instead live in the world, “entangle further”? In the tradition of the great poet-teacher treatises before it… Diving Makes the Water Deep gifts the reader closer contact with the world by documenting one life’s devotion to art.
—Lisa Wells
If everything you’ve ever heard said about poetry was a beautiful forest in which everyone had already dutifully documented every fir and fern, muskrat and butterfly, but no one had ever turned over a single stone on the forest floor and observed what was living on the surface of the soil out of casual notice, then reading this book is like—I know it sounds crazy—getting to breathe the earth beneath that stone.
—Mark Leidner
Bio:
Zach Savich was born in Michigan in 1982 and grew up in Olympia, Washington. He received degrees from the Universities of Washington, Iowa, and Massachusetts. His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Open Award, and other honors. His fifth collection of poetry, The Orchard Green and Every Color, was published by Omnidawn in 2016. He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and co-edits Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.
- GenresPoetryNonfictionMemoir
184 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2016
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 17, 2016
O world. Effective post-election balm, somehow: nothing like unsettled associative intelligence charged with mortal urgency to upend expectation and anxiety of the world's inevitable end. The sort of book that makes you want to read more poetry and write and live committed. Insightful and energetic bursts about poetry, teaching, pain, friendship. Recommended if you're looking for something to get you through to whatever comes next, a fully unfurled sail to propel our shrunken boat.
February 7, 2017
I cannot recall the last time I have felt so deeply for a piece of nonfiction.
That's a lie. The last time I felt so deeply for a piece of nonfiction was Maggie Nelson's Bluets.
Zach has a way of writing that makes you feel but also makes you feel almost guilty for feeling. He doesn't want your pity. He has cancer; it's a fact. He doesn't want your pity. He wants you to be human. Every human being (unless, of course, they were born with a predisposition not to feel empathy) pities -- we cannot ignore this fact. We are pitied; we are pitiful; we pity. On the back of the book, there are reviews. Jess Lacher says, "This book made me want to be my most human self, drunk and shirtless and climbing a hill." I agree wholeheartedly with her.
As I said before, in my review of his book of poems, The Orchard Green and Every Color, I had the pleasure of meeting Zach; he came to my school to read for us and to speak with us about what it's like to be a poet and also what it's like to be himself; and that, both unexpectedly and expectedly, influenced my reading of Diving Makes the Water Deep. This is not a very long book. It should not have taken me over a month to read, but every time I looked at it, all I could think about was how much this felt like an ending of sorts.
It's a beautiful, beautiful book. I am lucky that it was published in my lifetime. I am lucky to have read it.
That's a lie. The last time I felt so deeply for a piece of nonfiction was Maggie Nelson's Bluets.
Zach has a way of writing that makes you feel but also makes you feel almost guilty for feeling. He doesn't want your pity. He has cancer; it's a fact. He doesn't want your pity. He wants you to be human. Every human being (unless, of course, they were born with a predisposition not to feel empathy) pities -- we cannot ignore this fact. We are pitied; we are pitiful; we pity. On the back of the book, there are reviews. Jess Lacher says, "This book made me want to be my most human self, drunk and shirtless and climbing a hill." I agree wholeheartedly with her.
As I said before, in my review of his book of poems, The Orchard Green and Every Color, I had the pleasure of meeting Zach; he came to my school to read for us and to speak with us about what it's like to be a poet and also what it's like to be himself; and that, both unexpectedly and expectedly, influenced my reading of Diving Makes the Water Deep. This is not a very long book. It should not have taken me over a month to read, but every time I looked at it, all I could think about was how much this felt like an ending of sorts.
It's a beautiful, beautiful book. I am lucky that it was published in my lifetime. I am lucky to have read it.
June 1, 2022
A lyrical essay that's all about illness? Count me in.
March 6, 2017
I like this book, because it has roses in it. Sigh...
November 7, 2018
poetry disguised as prose, and i'm 100% here for it.
December 27, 2016
Disclaimer: the author is my (writer) daughter's (writer) husband. The poetic language of this book does not hide or dilute the serious nature of the subject: struggling with life-threatening illness. The expressive qualities of the language are like the hand held out to you to guide you through travels in many ways as harrowing as Dante's. Page by page you move along with the beautiful mind of the writer through experiences that break your heart. You keep going because of the mind and really amazing heart of the writer and the strength in the language. If you want to know about life, you should read this book.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews