“Civil Service is a palimpsest of our injured and injurious time. . . . Claire Schwartz reveals the potent work of language that distills the clutter of the world’s corrupt orders into an urgent wisdom. Here is a poet of astonishing openness, who flees no corner where power lurks unexamined.”
“The power of this book is in its uncontrollable private will to imagine against the public failure of imagination. The poet dismembers our political reality into the double-edged lines, into the bare and ashamed symbols and silences. Brutal and coy, Claire Schwartz creates a scream out of irony and a rhythm out of the four corners of the page.”
Provisions was a column that ran biweekly in Jewish Currents from April 3 – July 20, 2020. Conceived as a way of sharing and reflecting on poems held close as we confronted the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the pieces took on new forms after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police triggered a global uprising against anti-Black racism. In this volume, the columns are collected into a beautiful perfect bound book alongside the poems discussed in the pieces, with new illustrations by Anya Levy.
winner, 2016 Button Poetry Prize, selected by Aziza Barnes
“Oh, this little book broke me. The language here is staggering, the formal ambition and virtuosity obvious even at a glance, but what sets Claire Schwartz’s poems apart is their monumental compassion dealing with subjects—homelands, genealogies, taxonomies, and the violent histories and presents inherent to each—which, in their infinite complexity, defy all but the most earnest and searching poets. In a breathtaking longer piece, Schwartz writes, “I have a truth & a family—which do I serve?” It’s this sort of questioning, this sort of fearless interrogation of inheritance that elevates Bound to a higher plane of art—it’s not just an incredible book of poems, it’s an incredible feat of empathy. I am a grateful student of its grace.”