Name: Zero’s Blooming Excursion by Jared Schickling
SKU: 978-1-60964-001-9
Price: 16.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Zero’s Blooming Excursion seems a trans-bifurcation of voice, some cacophonous unity of strange symbols, visual, aural, intellectual, collaborating in the emergence of something deeply spiritual: The awakened human mind dealing with the chaos, projecting the Arabesque patterns of its own movements. If one is to be literate in the realm of Zero’s merged pineal glands, one must make sense of its seams, as much a painting to make sense of (the repeated Chagall) or puzzle to construct (the chemistry and mathematics) as a poem to read, a critifiction seducing its reader into numerous re-reads, each one producing different patterns and forms of pleasure, the very embodiment of Calvino’s ideal of multiplicity. Bizarro science, invisibility cloaking, numerology, Kabbala, lots of trivial news and obscure data (like patent backgrounds), all add up to a paranoid yet valid approach to the cosmos which seems to subvert or counter its own overt nihilism. Schickling’s book is a brilliant success.

—Chuck Richardson

Zero’s Blooming Excursion has “a hundred mouths,” and each mouth speaks at once. With combinatory precision, Schickling brings a redactive resonance to the face of the page. Erasures zero in on what’s important. Headlines, statistics, equations, weather reports, thought bubbles are more than frames. They are the forms of our common thinking. Reading Zero’s Blooming Excursion is like hovering above one’s own body while living; it’s unsettling ecstasy. Read this book and you’ll “find yourself next to yourself.”

—Sasha Steensen

This is a book I had to struggle my way through. Often I wondered, what is going on here? Slowly it dawned on me: Jared Schickling has devised a poetics that oprates like an ecology. It is, among other qualities, indifferent to whether I understand it or not—and the poems are no more concerned with what you or I think of them than rocks, moss, lichen, yucca plants, or clouds care whether you admire their shapes or scrape your knee on their sharp edges. I respect that. It’s tough, bracing, and worth the effort. It may take years to catch up to where these poems are taking us.

—Andrew Schelling

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Jared Schickling’s poetry, criticism, translation, interview, review, collaboration, has been published or is forthcoming in The Argotist, Bombay Gin, Big Bridge, The Café Review, Circumference, ecopoetics, Exquisite Corpse, Jacket, KNOCK (2006 Ecolit / Green Art prize), Literary Imagination, Matter Journal, Otoliths, Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, Word For/Word,the anthology 1000 Views of “Girl Singing” and elsewhere. He has three other books, Aurora, submissions, and O (BlazeVOX [books] 2007, 08, 09), and is an editor at Delete Press (letterpress chapbooks), Mayday Magazine (online), and Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry / Literature and Culture (online).