Zero's Blooming Excursion

Poetry. 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.