Zero's Blooming Excursion seems a trans-bifurcation of voice, some cacophonous unity of strange symbols, visual, aural, intellectual, collaborating in the emergence of something deeply spiritual: The awakened human mind dealing with the chaos, projecting the Arabesque patterns of its own movements. If one is to be literate in the realm of Zero's merged pineal glands, one must make sense of its seams, as much a painting to make sense of (the repeated Chagall) or puzzle to construct (the chemistry and mathematics) as a poem to read, a critifiction seducing its reader into numerous re-reads, each one producing different patterns and forms of pleasure, the very embodiment of Calvino's ideal of multiplicity. Bizarro science, invisibility cloaking, numerology, Kabbala, lots of trivial news and obscure data (like patent backgrounds), all add up to a paranoid yet valid approach to the cosmos which seems to subvert or counter its own overt nihilism. Schickling's book is a brilliant success. -Chuck Richardson Zero's Blooming Excursion has "a hundred mouths," and each mouth speaks at once. With combinatory precision, Schickling brings a redactive resonance to the face of the page. Erasures zero in on what's important. Headlines, statistics, equations, weather reports, thought bubbles are more than frames. They are the forms of our common thinking. Reading Zero's Blooming Excursion is like hovering above one's own body while living; it's unsettling ecstasy. Read this book and you'll "find yourself next to yourself." -Sasha Steensen