The Common Fire is a book of family stories from matriarchs to daughters, about the struggles we encounter in daily life; it is a journey wherein fire keeps igniting, beginning with the burning of flesh in a concentration camp and ending with enlightenment. The book is divided into four sections: Mama's Kitchen introduces the reader to family elders; Leaving This World reconciles death—of children, animals, even art; Just a Child glimpses at childhood and motherhood; and Searching for that Light is the quest for illumination, love and ultimately inner peace. The poems are largely domestic, and the author's Jewish background adds a strong flavor to the theme: Within the common experience, there is struggle and there is light.

Praise for The Common Fire

The Midwest Book Review writes:

"The Common Fire showcases this remarkable talent and will aptly serve to introduce a whole new audience of readers to a storytelling poetry."

Marge Piercy writes:

"Shelley Savren's poems in The Common Fire are warm and direct, full of the stuff of daily life, family life, joy and pleasure and grief and pain we can all identify with in poems that carry a strong emotional weight."

Li-Young Lee writes:

"These are poems of earnest storytelling and fond description. Nostalgia for gone worlds and affection for the evanescing present are the subjects and inspirations for this volume. A pleasure to read."

Suzanne Roberts writes in a review in Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal
(Vol. 15, No.1, Spring 2010):

"One of the strengths of The Common Fire is the narrative voice, which is most effective when employed with surrealistic leaps, as in the dream-like narrative of the opening poem, "The Smell of Stones." The poem effectively uses the sense of smell as a way to evoke memory. The poem begins:

The house shines a dim Shabbas
glow and I smell stones
in my mother's black iron oven
as they whiten to dust.

. . . The Common Fire is an impressive debut that shifts its focus from the whole to its parts - the lens narrows from the wider collective history and ancestral family to concerns of the nuclear family and finally to the woman as individual self."