Civil Service: Poems

by Claire Schwartz

Overview

A study in complicity with crushing state violence and an invitation to a chilling, remarkable debut.

While the spectacle of state violence fleetingly commands a collective gaze, Civil Service turns to the quotidian where political regimes are diffusely maintained—where empire is the province of not a few bad actors, but of all who occupy and operate the state. In these poems populated by characters named for their occupations and mutable positions of power—the Accountant, the Intern, the Board Chair—catastrophic events recede as the demands and rewards of daily life take precedence. As a result, banal authorizations and personal compromises are exposed as the ordinary mechanisms inherent to extraordinary atrocity. Interwoven with bureaucratic encounters are rigorous studies of how knowledge is produced and contested. One sequence imagines an interrogation room in which a captive, Amira, refuses the terms of the state’s questioning. The dominant meanings of that space preclude Amira’s full presence, but those conditions are not fixed. In a series of lectures, traces of that fugitive voice emerge as fragmentary declarations, charging the reader to dwell beside it and transform meaning such that Amira might be addressed.

In this astonishing debut, Claire Schwartz stages the impossibility of articulating freedom in a nation of prisons. Civil Service probes the razor-thin borders between ally and accomplice, surveillance and witness, carcerality and care—the lines we draw to believe ourselves good.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644451823
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	08/02/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
Sales rank:	401,461
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Claire Schwartz is the poetry editor of Jewish Currents. Her writing has appeared in Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker online, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.

Table of Contents

[The original gesture] 3

Interrogation Room 15

Death Revises Badly 16

Perennial 18

Interrogation Room 21

Lecture on Time 22

Apples 29

Preferential Treatment 30

Meaning Well 31

Orderly Conduct 33

Interrogation Room 37

Diet 38

Letter by Letter 39

Lecture on the History of the House 40

At Night, the Censor Watches His Wife Tuck Their Son into Bed 47

Parable 48

Interrogation Room 51

Hotline 52

Object Lesson 54

Minuet 55

Sense and Sensibility 56

Lecture on Confessional Poetry 57

Blue 64

Interrogation Room 67

L'Origine du monde 68

I Love My Body More Than Other Bodies 69

Graveyard Shift 70

Interrogation Room 73

Lecture on Loneliness 74

Notes 83

Bibliography 85

Acknowledgments 87

Editorial Reviews

05/16/2022

The poems in Schwartz’s arresting debut are loosely tied together to form an allegory about oppressive power structures and the harm wrought by even those on the lowest rung of a violent regime. Characters including “the Censor,” “the Archivist,” and “the Stenographer” revolve around “the Dictator.” Schwartz depicts an absurdist cognitive dissonance as these individuals work in service of despotism while going about their ordinary lives, as in “Preferential Treatment,” in which “The Censor uses the black crayon/ to eradicate sex. On payday, he takes/ his wife and son to Shake Shack.” A series of poems titled “Interrogation Room” features a woman named Amira who is held captive and asked questions such as “Do you believe in the nation” and “Have you ever loved an alien.” Schwartz is particularly interested in time and language: “The prisoner// knows she will die inside this sentence... Where the state does not recognize/ your sentence, your sentence/ is administered by the state.” While the overarching story doesn’t coalesce, the many lovely turns of phrase (“This is how she grows old, her face a lake the wind whispers to”) and originality of her approach make this memorable. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

[…] part of Schwartz’s undertaking here is to dissect the role of language in empire and, in so doing, to consider poetry’s ability to communicate directly with the reader and keep them from turning away […]”—Layla Benitez-James, Harriet Books

“Civil Service is a palimpsest of our injured and injurious time. It is the fine work of a poet who has paid long and close attention to things as they are. Unfolding the manifolds of civic life, Claire Schwartz reveals the potent work of language that distills the clutter of the world’s corrupt orders into an urgent wisdom. Here is a poet of astonishing openness, who flees no corner where power lurks unexamined. Schwartz’s great service to us is a book that lingers where ‘you cannot solve time, even with death.’ And from its pages we emerge with better language for the broken world.”—Canisia Lurbin

“In Claire Schwartz’s searing debut, a fugitive named Amira is balanced perilously between existence and non-existence, capture and flight. From the margins, she haunts the text while being subjected to the double entendre of the sentence. Words make her possible. Words confine her. Geometries of hospitality are also geometries of enclosure: the ‘I’ becomes a cell becomes a door becomes a house becomes a carton of milk that nourishes as it sickens. More than a book of poems, Civil Service is a profound statement on the nature of power, written as a fable about freedom in an unfree land.”—Jackie Wang

“When the truth comes in the form not of hard fact but rather of resonant understanding, it looks something like what we find in Claire Schwartz’s Civil Service. These poems are like scripture without mandate. . . . This book bursts forth with overwhelming beauty, power, and ethics.”—Elizabeth Alexander

“The power of this book is in its uncontrollable private will to imagine against the public failure of imagination. The poet dismembers our political reality into the double-edged lines, into the bare and ashamed symbols and silences. Brutal and coy, Claire Schwartz creates a scream out of irony and a rhythm out of the four corners of the page.”—Valzhyna Mort

“We’ve all heard the cliché ‘poems are bombs.’ But Claire Schwartz’s incendiaries whisper hard truths and harder questions, beckoning us closer, seeping gently into our consciousness before exploding the passive and placid thinking that allow us to go about our ‘normal’ lives. Civil Service shines a bright light onto a dark world ruled by property, prisons, patriarchy, and profit.”—Robin D. G. Kelley

“[…] part of Schwartz’s undertaking here is to dissect the role of language in empire and, in so doing, to consider poetry’s ability to communicate directly with the reader and keep them from turning away […]”—Layla Benitez-James, Harriet Books

“The poems in Schwartz’s arresting debut are loosely tied together to form an allegory about oppressive power structures and the harm wrought by even those on the lowest rung of a violent regime.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher