Civil Service: Poems

by Claire Schwartz

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.

Genres: Poetry

89 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2022

Reviews

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

'[AMIRA PULLS HER CHAIR CLOSER TO THE TABLE, CLEARS HER THROAT AS THOUGH SHE IS THE ONE CONVENING THIS MEETING]

What if we burn your books?

I will write more books.

What if we burn the forests?

The books I've written have already changed me.

And if we burn you?

My ash will be ink on the page of the earth.'

(p73)

[The Michigan Daily Arts]

“You cannot solve time, even with death. / The only clue is pleasure.”

What can the poet do? What obligation do they have, when they see injustice? What are the poet’s and reader’s responsibilities to language? Claire Schwartz forces us to reckon with these and other questions in her 2022 poetry collection “Civil Service: Poems.” The book loosely follows a woman named Amira in a dictatorial society populated by unnamed characters referred to by titles like “the Accountant,” “the Intern” and “the Censor.” In clever, thought-provoking verse, Schwartz critiques modern war, politics and the way language is weaponized in pursuit of violence and oppression.

Time and language are corporeal in this book; “Amira pulls the hours around her like a shawl” and “A woman feeds time to a meat grinder” are just two examples of the way Schwartz lends materiality and tangibility to concepts and abstractions. Although her writing can sound like parables, she is quick to remind you that this is not a metaphor — it is just an unspecified example of something that is already happening. With lines like “You lust after dental insurance” and “On payday, he takes his wife and son to Shake Shack,” Schwartz never lets you escape the sheer reality of the things she describes, never lets you take comfort in abstraction.

This book is a masterful, quick, cohesive and thought-provoking read that asks the reader tough questions and, instead of providing easy answers, provides a multitude of them. It reminds us why poets and their writing are important in the first place, and where poetry fits into a society that increasingly seems to devalue its existence.

Daily Arts Writer Emilia Ferrante can be reached at emiliajf@umich.edu.

https://www.michigandaily.com/arts/bo...

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is the present or the past more real? Which one judges the other "like a cashier turning a hundred-dollar bill toward the light, squinting, proclaiming it Real"? ("Death Revises Badly")

This three-line poem is a whole interrogatory: "Does torture produce intelligence? / It produces the forms of fact. / Do you call that intelligence?" [Amira Sits at the Table, Stares Straight Ahead.]

What is "palliative freedom"? ("Lecture on Time") Is it what they give you to produce the illusion of choice? Or is it the last bit of real choice they give you when choice is dying?

On teeth: "The boy shows the glass / his shining mouthstones and growls. He is a bear." ("Preferential Treatment")

"Let me turn my face toward my life. / Let me live inside it forever." ("Lecture on the History of the House")

"To name yourself is to commit yourself / to the task of your exoneration. / The name is the guilt." ("Lecture on Confessional Poetry")

[jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hosting is not always a posture of a generosity ... / Every time I write I. I am trying to get back to you.

So wonderfully elusive. I think best read in one go that way you can keep the initial echoes fresh. Reverberations makes the reading really well suspended between empty and belief. Read with the dimming sky while running away from lab, sweet little lamp light.

Find from road trip in South Dakota somewhere a while ago now <3 glad to have picked it up today

[Gia Anansi-Shakur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spellbinding. Schwartz is a impressive new talent. Her poetry is haunting and rhythmic as they are well crafted and dynamic.

[Tamar Plotzker · Rating 4 out of 5]

engrossing and beautiful and almost the right amount of confusing, but ultimately a lil' too confusing. In a way though this makes me very very excited to read it all over again.

[K. Iver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning mediation on grief, power, and probably a whole lot of other stuff

[danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me a minute to finally get through, but truly some of the best poetry I have read this year. I just got back from a writing group where we each started by sharing a work, and I used a portion of the last poem from this, but honestly as I was on the train over and leafing through, I think I could have picked so many of them. Excited to return and re-return to these for a while to come:

"A finger plumbing the depths of your night."

It rained in your room.
You mistook the ceiling for sky.

The rain allots you just one glass.
It has to last your life.

The rain extinguishes summer.

You behead the flowers.
You forget their names."


"G-d is what I walk toward when I walk out into my unknowing"


"Your feelings squat in the distance
between you and the war.

The distance between you and the war is your country.
The war is your country.

You think of this as nuance.

That you think about the war makes you human.

To be human is to endow lines with meaning
and make others susceptible."


"The Archivist, mind fast
to his research, passes the plundered animal by.
Books clutter his seeing. The knife, a better eye.
The flowers are screaming
the old scream. The Archivist opens his mouth
to join them. The scream clarifies an elsewhere.
He saw the flowers there.
The tulips were red."

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Did you think it was good?”
[The reader grimaces.]
“Then why did you write it?”
[Amira’s captive applause]
“Oh, the many ways to misread.”

This debut collection smacks too much of an MFA capstone project that exemplifies the obtuseness often required to obtain entry into the professorial rank-and-file of the Ivory Tower. As the poet writes in “Lecture on the History of the House, “We form our mouths to fence we in./ We fence our forms to mouth we in”—the “house” being a metaphor for the tower. “Inside the tower, the princess [poet]/ does not dream/ of the tower.” In this sense, “The original gesture” is a saving grace, “Object Lesson” a cautionary tale.

Favorite Poems:
“The original gesture”
“On Time”
“Meaning Well”
“Object Lesson”
“I Love My Body More Than Other Bodies”
“Graveyard Shift”

Favorite Lines:
“I is always trying to make a point
of you so I can locate itself.” (p. 26)

“To grieve is to long
to obliterate the future
which is everywhere
the dead are no longer
responsive to their human names.” (p. 27)

“The common animal of her innards disgusts her.” (p. 32)

“A house is a home
and other embroidered facts.” (p. 41)

“You don’t see thinking as an emergency.” (p. 42)

“You come to your senses like you come home to a two-car garage.” (p. 57)

“G-d is what I walk toward when I walk out into my unknowing.” (p. 67)

“Loneliness: the distance
between history and what history might have been.” (p. 74)

[payton · Rating 3 out of 5]

i do think that if i understood contemporary poetry better, or had came into this book with the realization that it attempts to reclaim language, i might have liked it better. for me, however, my favorite poetry is moving and emotive (which is way “blue” and “lecture on loneliness”) were my favorites in this collection. i found myself grappling with understanding what the poems were saying at times, which sort of “spoiled”” my experience as a reader.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some striking, at times spacious lines:

“The room is a past.
It contains only a blanket.
The now is a song, passing like light.
The room was a world.
You were once contained, singing.
The world was once is, will be our light.
And you, passing through, lightly, like snow.
It was not warm.
It is days past night.”

[Katherine Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you exercise me from your memory, I will enter your blood. maybe that is language: the shape that unsettles the thing itself. look how you've recast the body in language, so as not to lose what you've destroyed. look how you've made language a monument to your destruction and called it memory.
in bed he counts your teeth like stars.

[Kwame Daniels · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just phenomenal. The poet/book is constantly dialoguing with the reader's expectations and interpretations, and the book itself from line to line. Read this book if you want to see what poetry is capable of.

[Barry Westbrook · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Language is the perimeter of the interior.” Incredible debut from a brand new poet. Reminds me of Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic

[Brittany · Rating 3 out of 5]

"After genocide, he took up painting."

[Kelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought-provoking collection with verbs that strike like weapons.

[Luz · Rating 5 out of 5]

“who hasn’t felt freed in the presence of someone’s deep thinking?”

too many favorite lines in this poetry book, but this one stood out to me the most!

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

Often clever and sometimes touching, though a handful of poems read like they could've been taken directly from social media. I enjoyed the propensity of wordplay.

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous collection, full of world-building and what language is capable of crafting, making, remaking, destroying.

[The_J · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Your dreams become modest, smooth their skirts, stand up."

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

"To grieve is to long
to obliterate the future
which is everywhere
the dead are no longer
responsive to their human names."