There are worlds we can imagine, but we live in this one: contingent and absurd. In her first full-length collection, Sarah V. Schweig aims to capture something essential and universal about this faulted inheritance.
These poems operate on the notion that the lyric can be discovered in scattered headlines, office-wide emails, road signs鈥攖he detritus of the everyday. But a poem doesn鈥檛 stop at found fragments; it creates something from them. These poems question and requestion what can be truthfully said, rediscovering the lyric in the very process of thinking, revising, and re-envisioning.
鈥淲hat we have in Schweig鈥檚 poems鈥攆ull of dark panache and a cool, even murderous, wit鈥攊s an auspicious debut.鈥濃擬ark Strand
鈥淭hese poems forge new paths where worlds have disappeared. Out of the tenuous rises the emphatic, with possibilities offered like prayers.鈥濃擜nn Beattie
鈥淭he effect of reading Sarah Schweig鈥檚 verse is quietly dazzling and hard to describe: hallucinatory nuggets of feeling are shaped through extraordinary formal precision, apparently everyday observation, a taste for bathos, repetition, and great precision of utterance. And the whole is full of longing and desire. Tinged with delicious regret and distance, Schweig evokes depth of feeling that will resonate with the reader. No, this is not nothing, but something fine indeed. It is a remarkable achievement.鈥濃擲imon Critchley
鈥淭hese poems issue from a mourning for a 鈥榤issing鈥 one (father, lover, child, God), an affliction of abandonment that propels the speaker into a triangulated, contingent world: a welter of cities, love affairs, dazzling sonic performances, and philosophical travel鈥攊ncluding 鈥榯reatises鈥 on nada and syllogisms on meaning (鈥榯here is no heaven, and no answers / to our questions鈥). Witty, intellectually ruthless, the mantra of these poems seems to be: travel lightly in this world of woe. 鈥楾ake nothing with you.鈥 Yet, however unlikely it may be to believe in, let alone bear the onus of, anything 鈥楶URE and PERFECT,鈥 this remarkably mature first book joins the ages-old dialogue about beauty, truth, and love: the (trans)figuration inherent in all ardor, all making. 鈥極nce there was a man, and then there wasn鈥檛,鈥 she writes in a tour de force elegy for the late poet Mark Strand. How to respond to such loss except 鈥榗over my face with my hands?鈥欌濃擫isa Russ Spaar
The Abandonment
A man I once loved has built a mountain.
You鈥檙e avoiding something, I say when I鈥檝e climbed to its crest.
That鈥檚 a projection, he says, repairing the thatched roof on his modest hut.
You鈥檙e projecting that I鈥檓 projecting, I say, Because your parents were psychoanalysts.
I sit down in the plastic grass, which he鈥檚 woven leaf by leaf into the turf.
You鈥檙e using description of a moment to avoid what鈥檚 really at hand, he says.
But I live for my art, I say. I don鈥檛 have anything else.
You had me once, he says, and you still said that.
When I ask if he would like to go swim in the Lake of Remembrance,
he says, Don鈥檛 change the subject. When I ask what I can do to help, he says,
Here is a shovel. The mountain never brought him happiness. The mountain never brought him peace. Now we will bury the ash of our teachers. On this we could agree.
