Jared Schickling

Aurora Jared Schickling

Poetry. The poems of Jared Schickling's AURORA are distinguished by their parenthetical titles, titles which serve as interludes as in '(war in the street) / (or, Note To Self)' or as digressions, suggesting that the poem functions beyond or without its frame, this frame of the title being ancillary rather than constitutive. In this way, the parts might be read as a long poem, split into three parts and these 'titles, ' lines of the poem. There is a bird's-eye cohesiveness to the book in that even the visceral moments of the lyric 'I' or the attentiveness to others and the banality of the everyday are situated on the earth. The title suggests a kind of cosmic order. AURORA is the dawn or the Roman goddess of the dawn, a figurative gesture at keeping time. Yet, aurora can also be read scientifically as the luminous phenomenon of emissions of light excited by the planet's magnetic field. Science and poetry, cosmic order and the quotidian bear a resemblance to new science; Schickling greets such a resemblance not by expounding on order or ideas of order--J'Lyn Chapman