The Ocean in the Next Room: Poems

(Paperback)

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Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, this collection of poems seeks answers about how to live meaningfully in a world saturated by white noise.

The question isnt / whatexists, writes Sarah V. Schweig in her engrossing and prize-winning collection, The question is whatdoesnt / diewithus Positioned from within the morass of modern-day living, The Ocean in the Next Room searches for the hard, abiding particles of truth buried beneath the mantle of late capitalism. Stillness. Sunsets. The circadian rhythm of trees. These poems guide us to look past content, brands, and relentless jargon to find meaning in those layers of the world that operate without human intervention or interpretation.

In verse that is at once inventive and innately familiar, Schweig unpacks the urge to make art, life, and connections even at the risk of becoming further entangled in the Anthropocene. Profound and clear-sighted, this collection urges us to lift our gazes from our screens and really look at the world around us. If we measure our attentions and sharpen our intentions, if we try again to write / the truth things, we might spy something real on the horizon.

Reviews

Praise for The Ocean in the Next Room

This extraordinary collection of poems does that strange thing Hegel tells us all great art does: in his lectures on aesthetics Hegel tells us that art makes appear the structures that would otherwise remain invisible to us. Through a series of interconnected pieces this collection works through and brings to light the complexities of life lived in the twenty-firstcentury.Cynthia Cruz, author of Hotel Oblivion

Praise for Take Nothing with You

What we have in Schweigs poemsfull of dark panache and a cool, even murderous, witis an auspicious debut.Mark Strand, author of Almost Invisible

These poems forge new paths where worlds have disappeared. Out of the tenuous rises the emphatic, with possibilities offered like prayers.Ann Beattie, author of A Wonderful Stroke of Luck: A Novel

The effect of reading Sarah Schweigs 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.Simon Critchley, author of Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts

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 wasnt, 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 handsLisa Russ Spaar, author of Paradise Close: A Novel

Author Bio

Sarah V. Schweigs poetry has appeared inBoston Review,Granta,Tin House,andtheYale Review, and her critical essays have appeared inPublic Seminar, and Tourniquet Review. Her first book,Take Nothing with You,was published by theUniversity of Iowa Press.She works as an editor, studies philosophy, and lives in Maine with her husband and son.