A/0

a/0 is a glorious, terrifying, tender enchantment–an immersion in a world made strange through the alchemy of metaphor–where approaching noon might become a horse, breathing hard, glowering. Here, it is always noon, falling snow forever filthy. Only the body is new: gaining a tooth, losing a vertebra, suddenly old at the wrist where brittle bone too easily crumbles. Through the magical confabulations of language, Laura Bylenok unconceals our infinite mutability and our gorgeously human capacity for kinetic empathy. Compassion alone can break the spell of endless noon: by the grace of fear, a red sweater becomes a woman’s body, the fallen woman a vision of our own desperate possibilities. Free to love and die, we are resurrected in time, restored by desire for changing light and changing seasons, joy and loss, the pleasure and grief of our fragile, transient, miraculous world. –Melanie Rae Thon // Laura Bylenok’s a/0 loops clockwise and counterclockwise through a quantum gothic tale of loss and transformation. What’s its genre? A nonce science of evanescent increments. Newton and Leibniz confer. A vertebra vanishes. Noon is now and null and now again. If time is infinitely divisible, it must also be infinitely expandable, Bylenok writes. Now replace time with Bylenok’s nimble, ruminative prose. Now replace must also be with is also infinitely readable, infinitely pleasurable, and. –Zach Savich