Us from Nothing

Bouvier gives us a time-lapse view of time itself—all of it—from the Big Bang through the emergence of humans (music composes us) on to the present day, in which we are the aliens, and from there into an amortal future. His intricate and stunningly beautiful sentences are full of surprising scientific specificity. It’s sleight of hand at its most poetic.
– Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time

This is a marvelous book. Only an immensely fertile imagination could tell so elemental a tale in so straightforward yet evocative a fashion. Simple sentences often carry astounding weight. Bouvier makes one care about characters like “Life” and “We” and then the emergence of virtually all of the world’s major thinkers in cameo.
– Charles Altieri, UC-Berkeley

Geoff Bouvier has written a tour through physics and biology and language and art and mathematics and sociology, to the point where such categorizations fall away into meaninglessness, and everything becomes, again, one. This book, like all great books, reframes reality, imagines unbelievable true stories, and by doing so creates for us a richer way of apprehending the world.
– Patrick Madden, author of Disparates

An encyclopedic epic after Eduardo Galeano, Us from Nothing takes on history in poetically compressed, paragraphic cantos. In conversation with cosmic origins as it connects with patterns, past events and pressing concerns, the whole corrects records, and delights in telling a tale of the tribe. A contextualizing arrangement, part Blake, part Williams, wholly relational and delighting.
– Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure