Half and a second ...

Jared Schickling, The Pink (BlazeVox Books, 2012), 75 pp., unpriced

Unlike the Wittgenstein-inspired ruminations of Schlesinger’s book with the same title, Schickling’s exuberant derring-do refers explicitly to the German folktale (one of the ones collected by the Grimm brothers) called “The Pink, Or The Carnation.”  But Schickling’s book is more than just a masterful rewriting of the original gender-bending story. Its concerns with patrilineal and matrilineal tactics, pitting gods against humans, parents against siblings, servants against masters, and so forth becomes the launching pad for a bizarrely compelling mash-up of Joyce’s Portrait (“bee bay / yoo hoo”), L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (“Power lines! lashed to boards bolted a species of limb snapping one night through gusting minor storms”) and Dante’s Inferno ( “B.” is our narrator’s spunky daughter, Beatrice). The mix-up/disappointment of the queen in the fairy tale (she is accused of murdering her son) occasions our narrator’s tale as a journey from childhood (“I was an accident”) to fatherhood. A dizzying display of different fonts, typefaces, prosaic and verse forms, The Pink ranges back and forth between the perspectives of children and parents, boys and girls, and mothers and fathers. In that sense it is truly a family tale as well as an intensely personalized autobiography. In other words, this is the kind of poetry only a parent or a child could "get," if not throughly appreciate,  though the rest of us can revel in its linguistic inventions and marvels.