The poems in Jared Schickling's submissions explore the dislocations between self, community, and our desiccated political and ecological landscapes. The pressures of such disasters may be a point of departure for these poems, but they move toward a promise of habitation found in the shared spaces within both animal and human kingdoms. This more fertile terrain is made possible by the artifice and apertures of the discourses between them, as evident in poems that translate, but with resistance, as they speak in a multiplicity of tongues that waver between public and private, natural and subjective. The entrances to these charged spaces are awkward, partial, and sometimes painful, but the scope and pull of these potential commons can curve our isolated selves into more adaptable shapes. In doing so, these poems bring the news that while our individual messages invariably split into lonely factions, we can still find common ground in a language that is “on loan and full of intentions.”  

—Jonathan Minton, editor of Word For/Word

Cutting ruthless swathes into the dense thickets of history and culture, Jared Schickling's submissions is the linguistic detritus of his singular explorations. Hard to classify, impossible to pin down, this poem demands attentive reading and re-reading. Its unforgiving energy and relentless tension make it seem as if Herman Melville and Susan Howe got together and, during an awkward pause in the conversation, conjured Jared Schickling from a dark corner of the room.

—Daniel Bouchard, author of Some Mountains Removed

Heads or tails. Choice or chance? As the title of this collection suggests, Schickling has submitted himself to language and in so doing, has made a poetry of pure invention.

—Pam Rehm, author of Small Works

 

 

_______________________

Jared Schickling's work has appeared in The Argotist, Artvoice, Borderlands, The Cafe Review, freefall, Helix, The Strip, Word For/Word, and elsewhere.   In 2006 he won the KNOCK Ecolit/Green Art Prize in poetry.   BlazeVOX published his first book in 2007, Aurora.   He is an MFA student at Colorado State, an assistant editor at New American Press and Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry / Literature and Culture, and an editorial assistant at The Colorado Review.