The word “syzygy” refers at once to the alignment of celestial bodies in astronomy, repeating relationships in mathematics, and male/female pairings in Gnosticism. T Fleischmann’s Syzygy, Beauty, then, is an essay ordered by complimentary needs: art criticism, the narrator’s construction of a house, and the direct address of a lover. Playing with scale and repetition, the speaker keeps us off-center, and therefore always looking, as we are led through an intimate relationship that is complicated and deepened by multiple partners, gender transitions, and itinerancy. In language both plainspoken and startling, Fleischmann attempts a reconciliation between the sadness and beauty that come with a love that must always be, in some ways, distant.