Good little stillnesses,
guardians-to-be.
If you are good, one day
an embossed
invitation will arrive at the door of the house
you own. You will
sit next to the Curator, light
chattering along
the chandeliers, your napkin shaped like a swan.
To protect your
silk, you snap its neck with flourish. The blood, beautiful,
reddening your
cheeks as you slip into the chair drawn just for you. Sit, the chair
says
to the patron.
Stand, to the guard. The guard shifts on blistered feet. She loves
you,
she loves you
not. The children pluck the daisy bald,
discard their
little sun in the gutter.
—from “Object
Lesson”
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.
