Zero by Tyler Little

Zero, an integer that expresses an absence, a being there that signifies the inverse, space inhabited to indicate nonspace. In Tyler Little’s debut chapbook, zero is not so much a paradox of operations as it is a historical process, from nothing, a brief flicker, and return to nothing. For Little, this order is inherently atavistic but that lineage requires investigation. “I, has been / found / from the form / without / origin” she writes, invoking the poetics inherent in questions of heritage. Old photographs and documents form a constellation across Little’s jagged and paratactic lines and effectively blur the temporal, confusing the ontological origin of the self. This is complicated by the act of writing itself which induces a split. Little’s poetry does not seek to find harmony in this rupture, but to uncover more between the cleavage. Take for instance:

my excrement opens and excavates me,
sloughs its way off
of my crack, the body’s fissure, cut in two,
my twin, who lies inside
me, looking in, one of shadow, masa confusa
Medusa, who follows
her son in her nightmare gait

Tyler Little’s Zero is as stunning a debut as they come and makes abundance out of a tightly woven matrix.
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Tyler Little is a poet from North Carolina. Her work has been published in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020) and elsewhere. This is her first chapbook.