Mingle

by Caleb Parkin 

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.

“In Mingle, Caleb Parkin creates a space of panpsychically playful interaction between all Earth’s beings, giving its attention to the experience of waterlilies and inflatable penises alike. The reader is encouraged to look deeply at the world around us, with the awareness that it just might be staring back. Our natural interconnectedness and mixed-up-ness is expressed in a balance of fragility and camp joy, by a poet with a gift for wit and the unexpected.” - Suzannah Evans

“Mingle is a fizzing meditation on our queer and marvellous intermingled world, its bounty and its poisons, our interconnectedness and our complicity. It raises important questions about the inseparability of systems and their consequences: from the awful irony of curing one cancer, but causing another, to the ever-presence of human medications and interventions in the more-than-human world.” - Polly Atkin

Caleb Parkin has poems in The Guardian, The Rialto, The Poetry Review and was guest poet on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. His debut collection, This Fruiting Body, was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022. He’s published three pamphlets: Wasted Rainbow (tall-lighthouse), All the Cancelled Parties (collected City Poet commissions) and The Coin (Broken Sleep). He tutors for Poetry Society, Poetry School, Cheltenham Festivals, First Story, Arvon, and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP). From 2023, he’s a practice-as-research PhD candidate at University of Exeter, as part of RENEW Biodiversity.