Swoon

Swoon

David James “D.J.” Savarese is an artful activist, multigenre writer, scholar, teacher, and practicing optimist. A 2022/23 Iowa Arts Fellow and Zoeglossia Fellow, he has co-authored a chapbook titled Studies in Brotherly Love (2021) and authored an ekphrastic series titled A Doorknob for the Eye (2017). Co-producer, narrative commentator, and subject of the Peabody award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery (2017), he founded Listen2Us: Writing Our Own Futures as an Open Society Foundations Human Rights Initiative Community Youth Fellow. Praise for Swoon: "D.J. Savarese's poetic intelligence is alive and capacious and generous. These poems range from the small and daily to the grand and luscious, but every one is marked by devotion to the individual moment and tenderness for lived experiences, even the painful ones. Every realization is unexpected and new, every brightness forgiving, every darkness a new chance to understand. I am simply in awe of such a keen eye, such a musical ear, such a golden construction of attention." — Kazim Ali, author of Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) D.J. Savarese is a young poet of exhilarating originality, who writes with a clarity of mind and spirit that is remarkable for a poet of any age. The poems in Swoon span vast personal and imaginative distances—from searing glimpses of childhood abuse, to witty reports from the seasons (“February needs a root canal”), to spectacular geological odes, to the delights of an art that “makes of seeing a spiritual practice: the eye in its pew.” Savarese invites all readers— including those of us whose neurotypical senses “live alone like bachelors”—into the sometimes sea-tossed swoon of synesthesia, where the senses “lose themselves in one another’s arms.” These poems will astonish you with their fearlessness and beauty and widen the aperture of your own heart and mind.— Lynn Powell, author of Season of the Second Thought This extraordinary debut is a gift to anyone who reads to understand human experience, and to feel. These poems are graceful, powerful, confident, honest, and exciting. In them, a thoughtful, brilliant, sensitive, funny, outspoken, preternaturally wise young man shares himself and his perceptions of the world around him, from childhood to the present. I experienced his world intensely, and lifting my head, gratefully began to experience mine anew. —Matthew Zapruder, author of Father’s Day and Story of a Poem