Whether considering the impact of modernization on local and global societies or exploring inner conflict within close relationships, the poems of The Ocean in the Next Room remain faithful to their unsettling yet illuminating tone. Sarah V. Schweig’s poetics wants to be “close to the truth” that comes out of life and the everyday. It is deeply philosophically ambitious, finding surprising parallels and sounding across distances with vulnerability. Often in argument for the importance of making space for beauty, observation, and stillness, the book’s strength is also in depictions of post-pandemic life:

I’ve been in the city all this time
telling myself: You are living your life
Years went by that I didn’t notice the sky
until I glimpsed the sky in the stream of images
I thumb through from time to time.

Winner of the 2023–2024 Jake Adam York Prize, Schweig’s second collection is far-reaching in noticing not just how people react to society, but in peeling back the layers of its functioning. The speaker of these poems might stagger, sway, sleepwalk, walk in circles around the neighborhood, take the train to work, or go on vacation, glancing up at the reader from one of many screens as together we observe a slow and bleak apocalypse.

The first few poems construct a surreal world just barely removed from ours. Schweig, who is writing a philosophy dissertation on the value of poetry, subtly twists the glass in front of our eyes to bathe society and our everyday habits in a purgatorial yet clarifying light. “The literal is all that’s left us, them, anyone. / It’s what we’ve been taught, what we’ve been told,” says the speaker of the poem “Waves.” “The scramble of headlines is the world.” From this chaos is delusory or brief escape: we can entering life by creating it. We can travel. We can crowd out thought with motion. When we move, we “bring our little devices along, just to prove / our lives have worth, our lives have use” (“Unaccompanied Human Voice”). 

An often detached speaker, as if narrating frankly from the end of a long life, depicts a dystopia wherein they are an exemplar of public complacency with white-collar subjugation and physical labor alike – and with the formulaic expectations of a life: 

And then I went to seek The Great Unity.
Goodbye, I said, my family, as I left them.
I worked for a company in a municipal building.
In a hole, with my belongings, I built a home.

The reimagining of labels and irregular search for truth often connotes a restless, dissatisfied feeling.

We want to understand the meaning of experience. Back when poetry
poured from me, words brought up history, and seemed to
transcend. When poetry stopped, to the idea of The Great Unity
I clung.

In The Ocean in the Next Room, futility crashes against beauty, and eventually transcendence is approached not via labor and productivity, not in the safety of structure, but in moments of fluidity, self-expression, aesthetic experience, selflessness, and love. 

My favorite poem is “The Tower”: an uncanny, captivating reframing of capitalism’s glowing ideals of too-big-to-fail expansionism and industry. The poem’s mix of the archaic and allegorical with modern and corporate words like viral, mission statement, meme, monitor, dead-end position, adds to its chilling atmosphere. Under an illusion of choice (much like themes of the TV series “Severance”), the speaker lives the passive, feudal office worker life so many Americans can no longer rely on. 

“There was a tower of stone in a field of stone,” begins the poem. The Tower stands alone in its landscape, emblematic of its unnamed country. A symbol of standardization and corporatocracy, it also suggests anti-community, as downtown centers are a result of decades of highways tearing through inner cities to connect flat, sprawling suburbs to centers of manufacturing and regulation, contributing to issues like the lack of third spaces, local social bonds, or integration of agriculture into residential areas.

The people of the Tower have learned from birth to expect, and be grateful for, the banality of authoritarian evil, and to compete. Moving through its cycles, they have little real autonomy, but worse yet, lack the vision and imagination to see how bad things really are or how to instigate revolt. Through labor, they slip into lives that grow unbearable and drained of color – they are alternately coins or instruments evaluated only by usefulness and complacency. 

Here’s a taste of the stripped-down language and relationsitic story of the longer poem:

Our Director, heir to the field, attended an ivy.
From him we learned that to beget the industry
that creates more industries, some authority first hath
to beget the word beget. It is similar with the population.
Fall came and the breeze changed and the Tower
filled and emptied, swaying. My office came and went
through the tunnel, singing the mission statement
of our company. I came home to unzip my sheath.
I came home to my wounds and worked them
to heal. I unwound with a glass of wine and released
my life from the vise for the length of a sleep.
Honest, our Director thinks of the office as family.

The sense of a line is sometimes amplified by double meanings, especially of terms used to describe nature: field, skein, streams. Or the speaker’s use of sheath as a clue that she was, in fact, born to be capable, sharp, and dangerous – a weapon dulled, neutralized, and fit into a box of strict gendered parameters, foreshadowing how childbirth is commodified as matter-of-course in this world.  

Sheath (noun):

a close-fitting cover for the blade of a knife or sword.

a structure in living tissue which closely envelops another.

a protective covering around an electric cable.

a woman’s close-fitting dress.

a condom.

This comes up again with hanger: a symbol of utility and domesticity as well as desperate, deadly, nonchalant violence. 

Several poems become concerned with the growing discrepancy between privilege and poverty, even globally, including the generational and systemic causes of this kind of inequality. The book ends with “Longest Night,” in which a mother “cannot reconcile” how “recipes and war and discount pianos/scroll in the feed.” This poem connects the collection’s early narratives to an even stronger sense of real-world urgency.  

……………….… My child sleeps

while others die. I cannot

reconcile. Even here traffic halts

when lights shoot up, like the sky

suddenly growing a spine, I later learn

are a billionaire’s satellites

leaving Earth.

…..

…………………………. We are

the kind of animal that bequeaths

love and hatred. The moon rises

over the bay, and the feeling is

breath-taken-away. Have I told you

it’s beautiful here? Have I told you

tents are everywhere? Even here,

there’s a plan to “sweep” encampments,

another word for out, out damned

refuse, as noun (rhymes with loose),

while that house being built rises

higher and higher, the feeling being

can’t-catch-a-breath at the thought

of the question of where people

will go or what they will do.

The split image and split emotion are powerful and sensory, but the book’s decided internality might at times reduce the speaker to a witness not only safely removed from a hardship, but also from the human figures whose stories are hinted at or used for argument, but not necessarily further approached or appreciated. Particularly in these more “realistic” and intimate poems, where specific emotional and imagistic details come from one side of the wall but not the other, a shift from the binary, or from centering the speaker’s reactions, might be something I’d like to see happen in Schweig’s next book. 

“Poetry taught me the inner coherence that I believe to be the mark of a strong philosophical argument,” says Schweig. Through cityscapes, seas, and relationships at once fragmented and whole, The Ocean in the Next Room seems to arrive at enlightenment defined as a holistic combination of things: the dissolving of labels into one internal, slowed understanding of trust in the self, with the inner world just as crucial as the outer. But to get there means overcoming the distractibility, avarice, overthinking, and dissimulation of that self.