"Precise Machine is a collection of poetic fictions that swell with simultaneous dimensions. The pieces take us around the globe and through history, weaving an epic of moments large and small: a bike's flat tire, a teenage comeuppance, an Italian city destroyed by plague. The prose seduces and derails, then ensnares again. Barone invites us to inhabit his stories and also 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 parables do not patronize."--Publisher's website.