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. Barone's work has appeared in the CHICAGO REVIEW, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, and Quarter After Eight, among others, and is the author of many books of poetry and fiction carried by SPD, including TEMPLE OF THE RAT and ECHOES.