Caleb Parkin’s dark and mischievous second poetry collection Mingle stirs up the toxicities between landscapes, ecosystems and bodies, in poems bubbling over with hyper-wealth and haunted by tarnished ideals. Through creatures, compounds and chemicals, the poems probe what makes up our world's matter, and how we use it for good or ill. From gold to hydrocarbons, radioactive gardening to viral memes, the resulting mixture is a potent poetic cocktail…
Here, intimate connections and grand narratives are unsettled; we are implicated in prickly histories and weird futures and the natural world reminds us of its unruliness – as well as our own. Reflections warp in noxious ponds and voices distort and echo in uncanny landscapes. At times hyperreal and surreal, adventurous and technicolour, Mingle fizzes with the possibilities of queered language and altered states of poetic form.