Reservoir: Poems (Paperback or Softback)

Reservoir is a poetry collection that moves across landscapes both geographic and emotional — from the Spokane Reservation and Vinegar Flats to Ireland, from Pattee Canyon in Montana to the streets of a Philadelphia childhood. Zan Agzigian's poems are rooted in place and relationship: celebrations of family, tributes to friends living and dead, and meditations on the natural world that pulse with a restless, improvisatory energy. The voice is by turns tender and irreverent, shifting fluidly between lyric observation and vernacular storytelling, with poems that range from compact haiku-inflected pieces to sprawling, breathless narratives. A deep engagement with Indigenous communities and landscapes runs through the collection, reflecting Agzigian's long collaboration with Bitterroot Salish poet Victor Charlo. The book is dedicated to her siblings and to her dog, ItZy BitZy, whose presence threads through the poems as an emblem of unconditional love. With a cover image by Bill Kostelec shot on a 1940s view camera and an interior designed by Jodi Miller-Hunter, Reservoir is a book that holds memory the way a reservoir holds water — gathering, deepening, releasing.

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How many
Poems and Poetry Books
are Paeons
to an anguished present?
Try out one
which is an Eagle
flying over a lifetime,
and giving direction to the whole.

—Verne Windham, Producer of “Poetry Moment” via Spokane Public Radio/NPR

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Deep into this collection is a poem called simply “Love.” This was no surprise, for it was already everywhere enacted in surprising ways and growing from a pervasive empathy that is as wild and beautiful as it is remarkable. “All of us are womb of womb, / Born of muscular thunder,” writes Agzigian, whose poems have much to offer about what it is to live in relationship over time with friends, family, other animals, and place. In spite of all the loss and ache that comes with this, here, spilling over the sides of this Reservoir, is one soul's astonishing, let-your-hair-down capacity for the love of life.

—Derek Sheffield, Washington State Poet Laureate, Poetry Editor of Terrain.org, and author of Not For Luck