Fiction. Prose Poetry. PRECISE MACHINE is a collection of poetic fictions that swell in multiple dimensions. These pieces take us around the globe and through history in an epic of moments large and small: a bike's flat tire, a moment of teenage comeuppance, an Italian city destroyed by plague. Dennis Barone's prose seduces and derails, then ensnares again. He invites us at once to inhabit his stories and to 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.

Author Hometown: WEST HARTFORD, CT USA



About the author: Dennis Barone is a Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut. A graduate of Bard College, he received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1992 he held the Thomas Jefferson Chair, a distinguished Fulbright lecturing award, in the Netherlands, and in 1997 he received the America Award for fiction. His many books include AMERICA/TRATTABILI (Bordighera Press, 2011), PARALLEL LINES (Shearsman Books, 2011), FIELD REPORT (Quale Press, 2011), NORTH ARROW (Quale Press, 2008), PRECISE MACHINE (Quale Press, 2006), THE WALLS OF CIRCUMSTANCE (Avec Books, 2004), TEMPLE OF THE RAT (Left Hand Books, 2000), and THE RETURNS (Sun & Moon Press, 1996).