"Few books of poetry so willingly acquiesce to the negative potential of their constituent words as empty signifiers. And yet the words gain something for what they lose, like containers which, by being emptied of contents, diminish in cash value while becoming more variously useful. If her materials are freighted with history and teetering always on obsolescence, if they are at once overloaded and hollow, no less are they things capable of redescription, of new and far-flung application. Indeed, it’s uniquely hard to represent Schweig’s poetry in brief quotation. Any words selected are likely to be repeated elsewhere in the poem, to new and cumulative effect. The mode is iterative, provisional, “a kind of demonstration of how one idea or image / can always follow from the last.” This is not writing desperate to flee banality; it does not feign a special capacity for feeling nor delude itself that all is radiant and thick with consequence. Schweig instead gleans force from her own ambivalence, from a sense of distance and divested attention. In the spirit of the book’s titular allusion to the Gospel of Luke, we travel light. There’s no grasping at cheap prizes (“Clarity over emotion, remember. Story over sentiment”). This renunciation makes space for surprise."