Today's poem is "Quelle Night"
from Take Nothing with You
Sarah V. Schweig
is the author of the chapbook S. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Boston Review, HTML Giant, the Iowa Review, Tin House, Verse Daily, the Volta, West Branch, the Winter Anthology, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New York City.
Other poems by Sarah V. Schweig in Verse Daily:
Books by Sarah V. Schweig:
Other poems on the web by Sarah V. Schweig:
Sarah V. Schweig's Blog.
Andrea Hollander on Twitter.
About Take Nothing with You:
"What we have in Schweig's poemsfull of dark panache and a cool, even murderous, witis an auspicious debut."
"These poems forge new paths where worlds have disappeared. Out of the tenuous rises the emphatic, with possibilities offered like prayers."
"The effect of reading Sarah Schweig's 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."
"These poems issue from a mourning for a 'missing' 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 travelincluding 'treatises' on nada and syllogisms on meaning ('there is no heaven, and no answers / to our questions'). Witty, intellectually ruthless, the mantra of these poems seems to be: travel lightly in this world of woe. 'Take nothing with you.' Yet, however unlikely it may be to believe in, let alone bear the onus of, anything 'PURE and PERFECT,' this remarkably mature first book joins the ages-old dialogue about beauty, truth, and love: the (trans)figuration inherent in all ardor, all making. 'Once there was a man, and then there wasn't,' she writes in a tour de force elegy for the late poet Mark Strand. How to respond to such loss except 'cover my face with my hands?'"
October 31, 2008: "The Sunset District" "Meet me in the Sunset District, out by the shoreline..."
Seven poems
Four poems
Three poems
"Contingencies"
Three poems
"Toward the Great Unity"
"Bloodwork"
"They Will Sew The Blue Sail"
Mark Strand
Ann Beattie
Simon Critchley
Lisa Russ Spaar
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