Handling Filth: Simple Sabotage Field Manual uses CIA and military metaphors to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, the political and interpersonal traumas of the early 2020s, and the author's own experience with illness and sociopolitical strife. The book is held together by ecological, especially birding, symbolism that explores the coming climate crisis.

"It's both stirring and alarming to apply to one's brain a book like Schickling's Manual, a book that resembles the brain itself: miniature and cosmic, poxy and fluxy, moody, dim and bright. This Manual is like reading Thomas Browne or the schematics inscribed on the Voyager record-the past seems more and more accurate as a description of the present, while the present's own self-description grows more unrecognizable with every ballistic tremor of the eye. In an array of formats and formulations, this Manual sets fire to the bromide that he cataclysm of the present tense is happening for the first time. It is happening again." —Joyelle McSweeney