"Mingle" by Caleb Parkin (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from Magma, Finished Creatures, etc.

• I like the 1st poem, "Mingling Rituals", though the layout puzzles me (both the line indentation and the extra spaces between words). Its final line is the 2nd poem's title
• "keep in mind the beginning of things", the 2nd poem, has a more standard layout (11 left-aligned lines), though commas are replaced by spaces. The narrator nearly steps on a tiny fledgling and looks up, trying to find the nest "tas if to trace the cause is a cure". The language strains for effect even if the layout doesn't - "their pale buds quaking    ghastly with light-hunger".
• "19 Gigabecquerels" doesn't look like much.
• "Mrs Howorth's Irradiated Nuts" impresses me, though I'm not sure I like it.
• "Our South African National Parks" (4 pages) is beyond me. After a page, my eyes glazed over.
• "Auction" is an Erasure poem. My Erasure critique is "No".
• "Waterlily House" is a mirror poem, just about. I think I'd prefer just the first half of it.
• "Queertopia (Working Title)" has more quirky indenting, but also has "in my dream we orbited Earth/ hands held so tight they sweated/ until the dream-lens welled up/ like a porthole on a sinking ship/ and wouldn't it be perfect/ if I had woken up crying".
• "I found it beautiful" lifts rather too many details from Wikipedia's page on Dirac. It ends with "Not that it matters, but in this city// where you grew up, few know your name./ Unlike Schrödinger's hypothetical pet, yowling and clumsy in off-the-cuff/ chat. You are: one street sign; a sculpture/ without text. You are held in matter, precise."
• I like "Nuclear Beetroot"
• Well, I suppose you like "Two Tablespoonfuls" or you don't. It's not the kind of poem I'd like to convince non-poets about
• "Narcissus Aesthetics: Reflecting Perfection™" is another mirror poem where the reflection adds little - 2 pages this time.
• "Rave Babies" is 2-column with left-aligned couplets that are alternately in column 1 and column 2, until the final centred line, which (like some earlier lines) has extra spaces between some words - "each of us   poisoned   with love. The poem can't be read column by column.
• "Buy-A-Bear" is quite like Flash, but for the layout.
• "St Francis Christens the Animals in Notre-Dame, on Fire" isn't one of the poems that lacks punctuation. It uses ",", "-", ":", ";", ".", "(", ")", "?"
• "A Pink Sink" is another mirror poem!

Riffing, fusing and braiding are techniques that require space, which maybe explains why quite a few of these poems are a page or more long.