“What we have in Schweig’s poems—full of dark panache and a cool, even murderous, wit—is an auspicious debut.”—Mark Strand

“These poems forge new paths where worlds have disappeared. Out of the tenuous rises the emphatic, with possibilities offered like prayers.”—Ann Beattie

“The effect of reading Sarah Schweig’s verse is quietly dazzling and hard to describe: hallucinatory nuggets of feeling are shaped through extraordinary formal precision, apparently everyday observation, a taste for bathos, repetition, and great precision of utterance. And the whole is full of longing and desire. Tinged with delicious regret and distance, Schweig evokes depth of feeling that will resonate with the reader. No, this is not nothing, but something fine indeed. It is a remarkable achievement.”—Simon Critchley

“These poems issue from a mourning for a ‘missing’ one (father, lover, child, God), an affliction of abandonment that propels the speaker into a triangulated, contingent world: a welter of cities, love affairs, dazzling sonic performances, and philosophical travel—including ‘treatises’ on nada and syllogisms on meaning (‘there is no heaven, and no answers / to our questions’). Witty, intellectually ruthless, the mantra of these poems seems to be: travel lightly in this world of woe. ‘Take nothing with you.’ Yet, however unlikely it may be to believe in, let alone bear the onus of, anything ‘PURE and PERFECT,’ this remarkably mature first book joins the ages-old dialogue about beauty, truth, and love: the (trans)figuration inherent in all ardor, all making. ‘Once there was a man, and then there wasn’t,’ she writes in a tour de force elegy for the late poet Mark Strand. How to respond to such loss except ‘cover my face with my hands?’”—Lisa Russ Spaar