Claire Schwartz presents Civil Service, in conversation with Lara Mimosa Montes

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 not the province of 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.

Claire Schwartz is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service and the poetry editor of Jewish Currents. Her writing has appeared in the Nation, Poetry Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Lara Mimosa Montes is most recently the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Poetry Project, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the recipient of artist residencies from Marble House Project, Storm King: Shandaken, and Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2018, she was awarded a CantoMundo Fellowship as well as a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry. She currently teaches editing and publishing at the University of Minnesota.

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