The Pink by Jared Schickling

“The Pink” reads like a bio-centric futurist work of patterned effeminate lyricism and distortion whose themes are fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood, while playing heartily at inherited themes and motifs through re-worked fairy tales, observations (recordings), and children’s verses.

Jared Schickling’s The Pink is a fascinating inter-generic book about creating an autobiographical book and about the future creation of a possible novel. There are stories; stories of childhood and adulthood with a somewhat dark fairy-tale-like cast to them. And there are also regular other voices, or perhaps the same voices in other times, that are commenting on the “narrative” voice, sometimes with just a single word or two on a page. These are perhaps the book’s author, or the designer or puppet-master of the book in which that author speaks. These stories, narrations, and voices, are all mentioned or commented on. But in fact the majority of the book looks like poetry, and poetry is the one form that is not referred to explicitly in the texts. Perhaps one could say the poetry is unconscious here, and that therefore poetry is what this work is. But whatever it “is”, it is a constantly intriguing, unified single work, a thoroughly engaging narration-poem-meditation metatext text!

—John M. Bennett

In Jared Schickling’s newest explosive work, The Pink, generative conflations ensue: feminine becomes feminist, parents & children share consciousness, babes & poets are suckled and grown. Deploying gorgeously scissored phrasings, syncretic linguistic constructions, and sonic booms, Schickling here perfectly embodies Jakobsonian selection & combination, revealing the mother in the bottle, the boy who is, and the girl-to-be. As he aptly juxtaposes “the only way for something to be interesting / is to become something else” and “I’m jealous; I am not the people. / I am inside and outside and inside and outside.” All are the case, and we’re happy to live in such a fresh interstice with such a rangy brilliance.

—Sandra Doller

When ethical expression circles inward toward domestic setting, a blame-game collapses the hard nugget of family mythology. How then to spark the centripetal force of community, erotic bonds, demos? Here, in The Pink, Jared Schickling patches linguistic texture as quiet as a roaring Niagara seen from Google Earth, subversive as Psyche marked by the workplace, or birds by imprint. Why do we need what fairy tales reveal of a people’s striving for the elusive happiness of justice? Read on, alert for the token transfer.

—Deborah Meadows

Jared Schickling’s other books of poetry are Aurora, submissions, O, Zero’s Blooming Excursion, and t&u& lash your nipples to a post history is gorgeous (BlazeVOX [books], 2007-11). Current projects include a prequel to The Pink, “(pietà: Ramona’s Private Jest.),” a work of poetics, “The Paranoid Arrow: Studies in that American Fiction,” and occasional translations of passages from Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s L’automne promet. He likes 1913: a journal of forms; The Associative Press; Bombay Gin; Circumference: Poetry in Translation; ecopoetics; ditch, the poetry that matters; Exquisite Corpse; Interim Magazine; Jacket; kadar koli; Literary Imagination; Little Red Leaves; Omnia Vanitas Review: A Journal of Literary Erotica; Otoliths; Sous les Pavés; SpringGun; unarmed journal; We Are So Happy to Know Something; Word For/Word: a journal of new writing and more. In 2006 he got a KNOCK Ecoliterature / Green Art prize in poetry. He is a founding editor of Delete Press and eccolinguistics, and he serves on the editorial board of Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry / Literature and Culture. He teaches English at a community college and lives near Buffalo, NY.

.Book Information:

· Paperback: 80 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-115-3