Atboalgfpopasasbifl ― Irritations, Excrement & Wipes

Poetry. "For the first nine months it's like watching an approaching storm on a black and white TV. And when the static clouds, thumps and clicks turn warm and writhing in your arms, you're already in the teeth of it and it's only just begun. In two parts, Jared's work here records and enacts the terror of the expectant parent as well as the exhausted idiocy of he who is led around by the ankle. Jared's book doesn't list the so many things that can go wrong with the building storm inside her (though it does), but instead presents the reader with the bizarre eros of gestation and the old weirdness of not knowing what or how it will come. The family triangle becomes the prism by which one's sense of self is shattered, and the second part of the book offers a schizophrenic spectrum of voices that the tired hand, ear and eye record. If having a child is to enter into a permanent relationship with a stranger, this is it. 'The dream of the person telling the story is in his parents' house, walking up the stairs. His insides will display a series of gestures until he finds his bedroom full of raccoons, who will in the final twist be babies.' No place is safe; the storm never breaks; nothing is cute except as a side-effect of this strange and serious work. My two boys, both under two, are asleep upstairs right now. In its two parts, Jared's work reminds me, as hard as it is to be us, it's so hard to be them."—Andrew Rippeon

"Jared Schickling's latest collection—comprised of hybrid genre prose, footnotes, erasures, and struck-through lines of verse—engages compelling questions about the relationship between literary criticism and artistic practice: Is it possible for creative and critical discourses to coexist within the same rhetorical space? Can the literary arts facilitate unique—and even revolutionary—contributions to theoretical conversations? To what extent is every poem an act of deconstruction, a revision of the writing that came before one's own? As Schickling explores possible answers to these questions, his most subtle stylistic choices illuminate, and often complicate, the content of the work. His use of found language, annotations, and visible excisions of text illustrate beautifully the ways in which all writing arises from one's life as a reader. This is a smart, thought-provoking book by a truly gifted poet."—Kristina Marie Darling