Periodic Companions

"Periodic Companions is a balm for this contemporary moment, where many are discouraged and exhausted and have lost sight of the hive. Laynie Browne reminds us that the people we build our lives next to—even if they’re highly reactive entities, consumed by improbable endeavors—are what help us to materialize. This is one of the most consoling novels I've read in years. It is profound and completing."—Renee Gladman

"Reading Laynie Browne's Periodic Companions - I hear Wittgnstein whisper 'Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same' - I echo him: The lyrical is conceptual and the conceptual is lyrical and when the poetry is tremendous as in this book, these boundaries collapse, and what remains is the human in tears, returned to their basic element/s, in order to explore how they can mix with and alter each other. This profound longing to experience from different vantage points, to see like an other, is resolved here via chemistry. Reading Periodic Companions, I came close to believing that we might not be just destined to long, we might actually be able to live as multiple. Laynie is one of my teachers in becoming a better poet and better human. This book taught me a lot."—Maged Zaher

"Periodic Companions is a daring and wonderful novel. It recounts past events from the perspective of invocation rather than evocation and uses words as spells capable of summoning phantoms. Some sentences struck me like verses—'I would not be myself without the city'. As in Blanchot’s novels, the possibility or impossibility of language is a subject in itself. Questioning the conventions of plot and characters, Laynie Browne explores the collective nature of every story—and the way relationships are often based on the creation of a secret language."—Daniel Saldaña Paris