Zero

Author: Tyler Little Publisher: Ursus Americanus (2025) 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 offof my crack, the