A dark, cracked parable in the tradition of Millhauser by way of Kafka, Sebald, and, perhaps, St. John Climacus. Schweizer’s lyric exploration of capitalism, its artifacts and (especially) its denizens, casts an eerie spell. There is nothing else quite like this in contemporary American poetry. G.C. Waldrep With The Genealogy of Elevators , Harold Schweizer pulls off a steampunk reimagining of the history of urban technologies—and industrialized oppression. The old familiar tales distract us with heroes and long-forgiven excesses. Here those cede to a landscape in which the same modern wonders emerge—elevators, light bulbs—but by new routes, with fresh mythologies to lipstick the pig. What are these people doing? What are we allowing to take—no, to make—place? William Pierce Harold Schweizer’s The Genealogy of Elevators: A Fable is a marvel, a book about writing and violence and bodies that is also a history of machines. In these gorgeous prose poems, urban landscapes echo with fairy tales, Dante’s Inferno, the Ten Commandments, songs, and translations. Most of all, this is a book about language, its slippages and ruptures, its inadequacies and its exhilarations. Nicole Cooley