George Bernard Shaw said famously, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Yet teaching offers what Richard Selzer calls “mortal lessons.” If everyone, including the doers, must die, then, surely, we need instruction in the demise of doing. Cemeteries, you might say, are filled with teachers; we each become one in the end.
“Never Make Them Cry is funhouse bildungsroman, told from the other side of the room. Savarese slyly teaches that, to misquote William Blake, the road of much stress can lead to the palace of wisdom. And of great poetry.”–Susanne Antonetta, The Terrible Unlikeliness of Our Being Here
“Hilarious, with daggers for dessert.” –Paulina Bren, She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street
“A sublime meditation on the challenges of the bread labor we often discount, by a true master of the trade.”–Dean Bakopoulos, Summerlong
“In Savarese’s poems, …whimsy sits next to sadness. A classroom can be a set of desks. Or, it can be a garden, a parking lot, a son’s words, a funeral home.”–Emma Zimmerman, Body Songs: A Memoir of Long COVID
“While the poems are often wry or grief-struck, there’s a hard-won idealism at the center of the volume. As Savarese says, ‘Teaching, like love, should never be abstract.’” –Melanie Almeder, On Dream Street
Ralph James Savarese is the author of three books of prose and three books of poetry. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and Petoskey, Michigan.