The Breath

Cindy Savett’s The Breath is a riveting meditation on grief and resilience. Savett’s vivid, resonant poems create a language for renewal out of the urgent “phantom tongue” of loss. The Breath casts an honest, empathetic eye on the grief process, leading us, achingly, “into the stable of vanished gods” and encouraging us to “pace / within the flame” of absence–to reimagine loss as a transformative practice that can redeem the “hush / left behind.”

Tony Trigilio, author of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 1

The figure of the beloved in these spare, lyrical poems of mourning is a young daughter, a “bird child who choreographed my murmuring lips,” whose absence returns the poet to a state of spiritual and linguistic prima materia: a “wasteland of irony,” clay breath, and orphaned wolves. And yet from these elegiac archipelagos comes incantations so tender and haunting that they reanimate the very subject of lyric address (“O you, my pilgrim, my vein”), and transform the speaker, as she becomes both her child and a postlapsarian creator, awaiting from within a “stable of vanished gods” the “rise to mercy’s debris.”

Virginia Konchan, author of The End of Spectacle

Shattered is the word that defines this book. At its center is the death of a child, and that shattering extends beyond the child to the mother, beyond the mother, to the father, their marriage, the son, and the other daughter. What pieces belong to each is a question and a puzzle. The glue that holds it all together is the breath–the fact that you are continuing to breathe not just for yourself but for all the others both living and dead. This is Cindy Savett’s second book about her daughter’s death. You will find shards of poems sticking to your psyche for weeks.

Fran Quinn, author of The Horse of Blue Ink