The Ocean in the Next Room: Poems

by Sarah V. Schweig

Overview

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

“The question isn’t / what exists,” writes Sarah V. Schweig in her engrossing and prize-winning collection, “The question is what doesn’t / die with us?” 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 our frenzied consumer culture. Stillness. Sunsets. The circadian rhythm of trees. These poems guide us to look past branding, content-creation, and relentless jargon to find meaning in those layers of the world that operate without human intervention.

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 true things,” we might spy something real on the horizon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571315632
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	01/14/2025
Series:	Jake Adam York Prize
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Sarah V. Schweig’s poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Tin House, and the Yale Review, and her critical essays have appeared in Public Seminar, and Tourniquet Review. Her first book, Take Nothing with You, was published by the University of Iowa Press. She works as an editor, studies philosophy, and lives in Portland,Maine with her husband and son.

Read an Excerpt

Toward the Great Unity

And then I went to seek The Great Unity.

Goodbye, I said, my family, as I left them.

I worked for a company in a municipal building.

In a hole, with my belongings, I built a home.

I was young, always returning to the municipal building,

where an iron lamp hung, a flickering vestige of history.

And when I moved my belongings in with a man and out of

their hole,

Goodbye, my family. I’ll be writing you, I’d said.

In their search for meaning, they resemble me, my family.

We want to understand the meaning of experience. Back when

poetry

poured from me, words brought up history, and seemed to

transcend. When poetry stopped, to the idea of The Great Unity

I clung.

Each morning, I walked my body beneath the flickering lamp,

meaning nothing. Words brought up history, and I wrote it down.

It left my memory empty, and I forgot what I meant.

I’ll be writing you, I wrote, but could not bear the words.

Poetry stopped in my aging body. Now it carries what remains

of my family: the memory of my young brother, in the face of a man

visiting the home I built with another. Rarely, he flickers before me,

that boy, whom I could never fully record in poetry, in history.

2

I thought I’d find The Great Unity. It seems there is none.

Now I kneel down before its flickering idea, and my family

kneels down inside me. All of history brought us here.

Goodbye, I said, my history. And then my young brother disappeared.

Table of Contents

1.

Toward the Great Unity 1

The Tower 3

Poem on My Birthday 8

Tractatus 10

2.

Five Skeins 19

Meanwhile in our City of Abandon 24

Contingencies (III) 27

Theory of Ash 29

3.

Unaccompanied Human Voice 32

Waves 63

The Blue House 70

Longest Night 71

Notes 73

Acknowledgments 75

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Ocean in the Next Room

“In The Ocean in the Next Room, futility crashes against beauty, and eventually transcendence.”—Poetry International

“Schweig’s ability to clearly see this moment while leaving space for individual interpretation marks this collection as not just a testament to her intellectual capacity but also a vital contribution to contemporary poetry.”—Allisa Cherry, West Trade Review 

“Masterfully repetitious, the poem’s technologic think-speak and snatches of social banalities reflect a kind of human communication on autofill.”—Rain Taxi

“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-first century.”—Cynthia Cruz, author of Hotel Oblivion

“Sarah Schweig is to poetry as Francis Bacon is to painting: an artist of contradiction and clarity, of disordering and reassembling reality. The Ocean in the Next Room offers a wild gallery of fresh curious poems. Lucidity and daring come together in lines that proceed in unexpected ways. ‘I am / skeptical,’ writes Schweig, ‘of there being such a thing / as a self that one can just / lose.’ Instead, Schweig takes the self and breaks it into wild Bacon-like angles. ‘My life a poem I keep trying to revise,’ writes Schweig. The revisions show her mind in action: ‘Our love for our son is immense. / Then suddenly I forget his existence.’ In another poem: ‘These days, I look at my son and feel the terror / of love. And then I don’t feel a thing.’ How can both things be true? Paradox makes up her palette, no less than clear-eyed perception. Our poet reads Spinoza who said: ‘The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.’ She sees through the stale veils of received reality. She loves what is. For the most part. Her newness glistens on every page. Bacon wanted his art to see anew, to bring us closer to understanding what it means to be a human being. Schweig the same. I returned to these poems again and again because they held original thought. Glorious to have this ocean of invention on the shelf.”—Spencer Reece, author of The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir

 “We are / the kind of animal that bequeaths / love and hatred,” Sarah Schweig writes. How often do we stand in ruins with that love or that hatred? We carry ruin on our devices. We write poems while the world is lost. We light a light in the dark because the mind rests on remembering; the mind rests on ‘ancient worries.’ The Ocean in the Next Room troubled my sleep, disordered my thinking and made it anew, made me listen to my own troubled breathing, kept me by light. Schweig’s second collection is an astonishing miracle.”—Ricardo Maldonado, author of The Life Assignment

From the Publisher