Civil Service: Poems

“When the truth comes in the form not of hard fact but rather of resonant understanding, it looks something like what we find in Claire Schwartz’s Civil Service. These poems are like scripture without mandate. . . . This book bursts forth with overwhelming beauty, power, and ethics.”

—Elizabeth Alexander

“We’ve all heard the cliché ‘poems are bombs.’ But Claire Schwartz’s incendiaries whisper hard truths and harder questions, beckoning us closer, seeping gently into our consciousness before exploding the passive and placid thinking that allow us to go about our ‘normal’ lives. Civil Service shines a bright light onto a dark world ruled by property, prisons, patriarchy, and profit.”

—Robin D. G. Kelley

“More than a book of poems, Civil Service is a profound statement on the nature of power, written as a fable about freedom in an unfree land.”

—Jackie Wang