Precise Machine

by Dennis Barone

Summary

Precise Machine is a collection of poetic fictions that swell with simultaneous dimensions. The pieces take us around the globe and through history in an epic of moments large and a bike's flat tire, a teenage comeuppance, an Italian city destroyed by plague. The prose seduces and derails, then ensnares again. Barone invites us at once to inhabit his stories and retreat to the periphery to query how experience itself is recorded, catalogued and remembered. Infused not with certitude but with the far more human condition of ambivalence, these fictions are parables that do not patronize.