Zero Is a Number by Michael Hammerle

Set in crowded homes, pool-halls, and hospitals, the poems in Zero Is a Number are often tender, sometimes infused with violence, and relentlessly searching for meaning among stapled thumbs, snake tattoos, and gasoline baths. This propulsive pursuit of truth—words rushing across the pages in a passionate excavation—made me sit up straighter. Reading Michael Hammerle is like dreaming yourself into somebody else’s vehement, breakneck, ardent life.

–Rachel Pastan is the author, most recently, of In the Field. Winner of the Science + Literature award from the National Book Foundation in 2022.

Michael Hammerle’s Zero Is A Number is a poetry collection conveying snapshots of a family history—a family history full of fire, and Hammerle threads a nostalgic sentiment of a calm torment throughout these poems as he reveals a tiny splinter of the world, mixing and mashing video games with tattoos and skating rinks and wrenches and nails and sibling fights. There are variations of a household—a cracked image for each memory and a family member for each cracked image, as if we’re standing in the front yard and facing a home under the evening sun with our eyes barely open, squinting perhaps, as we try to make sense of the complications that come with those we love and remember. A door opened—indeed, into a living room of a family in search of each other’s hands. Zero Is A Number creates tangible ghosts and hazy realities, and it’s through these flashes and flickers of light, a marvelous poetry collection hums before us.

–Shome Dasgupta, author of Iron Oxide and several other books.

If we’re lucky, we live long enough to fix the math.  Zero Is a Number allows us to go back to the board, and if not to erase the mistakes, then to at least stare at them again.  In poem after startling poem, Michael Hammerle looks back with a searing honesty at a life you’ll have to read to believe. There are no symbols here.  There’s just the burn of the Florida sun, a staple stuck in child’s hand, stepfathers troubled with the cost of love, and grandparents who would press their last nickel into your palm.  There are elegies.  There is plenty of beauty.   Maybe all we ask of poetry is that it tell us something we can’t forget, and Zero Is a Number does just that.

–Jack Heflin, author of Local Hope