Allison Hawkins

Poetry collection

Jessica Savitz's poems are imbued with a strange, skeptical mysticism, in which a visionary impulse is interrupted, again and again, by anxious self-reflection. The mute orders are given voice, as Whitman directed, "without check with original energy," while emblems of over-refinement are returned to the realm of the organic: "Speech comes out fur-lined." Savitz's buoyant, melancholy, ungainly voice, with echoes of folklore, medieval romance, Spanish surrealism, Delta blues, Black Mountain poetics, and teh motley metaphysics of contemporary life, is a marvel of invention. Savitz is a genre unto herself.