Poetry. THE MERCURY POEM sifts through the aftermath of nuclear meltdown and lets the senses piece us together. A puzzle: in this our time of ever-expanding exclusion zones, how to take cover / take care inside foregone conclusion? What is not forgone? What is poetry inside such disaster? Ear to the ground, eye on the facts, and with heart and subtle humor, Jared Schickling offers a volatile music where 'flammable animals cavort / bioplastic / in the bioplast' and the fish choir takes over. Here is poetry that pulses, in search of. Read up.--Ryan Eckes

Writing from the liver of what he'd call a National Sacrifice Zone, Schickling's oozy syntax mixes tire fires and shrimp songs, transboundary waste dumping and hungry babies. And against easy, blissed-out landscape poetry, he gives us ecologies as they are: wondrous saturations of life and matter disturbed by floods of mutagenic pollutants in poems like damaged double-helixes that make a jagged sense read forward or backward. This collection is, by turns, playful and ethically rigorous, performing playful flips in language but also never forgetting we live in a world that will remain marked for millennia by acts of corporate and governmental malfeasance. The poems remind us that environmental catastrophe and quotidian life touch each other in intimate, ongoing ways.--Joe Hall

With THE MERCURY POEM, Jared Schickling brings us an oddly reversible apocalypse--the story of individuals grappling with their own bleak place in history. 'A tsunami ruining the beach / during an election season, ' 'the exclusion zone is breeding, ' and as an elegy to television, the poet finds normalcy in the unlivable.--Jonathan Penton