The Ocean in the Next Room

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-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