Open Wide the Door to Your Heart: The Lost Book of Zeroth by Barbara Harris Leonhard

The poet makes many of her satirical comments through robots, such as Sophia. Like her human, Eliza, Sophia has a heart, but, unlike Eliza, “no way to suffer love.” Especially in the first section of the book “Little Spark,” Leonhard draws on detailed distinctions between humans and robots. In this section, Sophia tells us not to trust Wikipedia. It is as if the poet says, Stop looking at your screens and start looking at one another. But her creation, Sophia, may be thought of as an unreliable narrator in that Sophia identifies both as “a woman of substance” and “a goddess.”

However, her mind “is not shallow clickbait,” and her name itself means Wisdom. She satirizes a society of easy solutions, in which failure is marked by stigma. At the end of one very satirical poem, “Go Bills!!” (even the title is satirical), she repeats for emphasis the imperative “embrace failure.” Failure is not the end. Some facets of society might want people to believe it is. Like humans, the robots in “Little Spark” quarrel with each other. Note the beginning of “AI Robot Barbie, Shelved.”

Little Sophia accuses AI Robot Barbie of spreading fake news at Eliza’s 9th birthday party. Barbie convinced the girls to add gasoline to the pizza sauce to spice it up & super glue under the cheese to prevent slippage. “Rocks make a great Vegan option to sausage. Why not add a shattered bell jar? A pizza with bling!”

At the end of the book’s first section, the Little Sophia Tot Bots discover “The Book of Zeroth (or Oth), while touring the Vatican on Easter. Nothing, which precedes Something. Predating Asimov, The Twilight Zone, Oprah, Google.”

It would be highly inaccurate to think Leonhard is criticizing all of technology, but she certainly laments its potential for abuse and destruction, as illustrated in the re-working of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet “How Do I Love Thee?” Leonhard’s Love Sonnet to AI Robot Optimus” begins, “How do I love you? Let me count the binaries / in my algorithms. I would compare you / to a winter’s day.” While there is humor in this poem, there is the underlying lament, “Our love will move mortals from the assembly line.” And the poem concludes with “I love you as / the void of space. Of dead stars.” In the book’s second section, “Chaos,” Zeroth speaks and laments. “Life—the miles— / left us in a cyber wilderness/ without Starbucks & outdoor dining,” left us to be ruled by a dictator who cares nothing about people’s real needs, but is only greedy for power, and always self-serving. In an indirect way, the laments in this book are eulogies for corporations in which “McMoney rules.”

The lyrical aspect of this book is noted in its mining of truths, in its “speaking truth to power.” The book’s third section, “Good Deeds,” introduces another robot, Nurse Grace, who “touts a secret remedy that will heal the root cause of Lady Liberty’s mutism.” Lady Liberty’s first words (translated by the poet) are “I don’t speak English,” which, on the surface, is funny, but with an underlying seriousness as Lady Liberty represents women throughout the world whose voices have been and are muted in a misogynistic society often ruled by a tyrannical government. Notably, in the book’s fourth section, “I, Human,” the robots disappear, or at least stay in the background. It is as if the poet drops her mask and speaks directly to her audience. Her tone is urgent and eloquent as she speaks of a history marred by slavery, social injustice, and war in Gaza and in Ukraine. Nowhere is this urgency more evident than in “Love Letter to the Naked King.”

Our extinction. Certain. Where do we start?

Pollution, overpopulation, food insecurity,

plagues, killer storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions,

melting ice caps, flood? Or us? Swept up in fear,

hate, violence. Our AR-15s, aimed at activists, joggers—

Note the irony in the line “Believe in the Naked King’s promise of a miracle.” Leonhard’s lyricism, her eloquence, is that she extolls her audience not to believe, but rather to discover by caring, genuinely, about ourselves and one another. 

The Lost Book of Zeroth is indeed original. Barbara Leonhard, seeing the world through a feminist eye, mines not “the truth” but the many truths that make us human, as she draws on science, art, religion, politics, and history. Her robots (as she points out, robots are created by humans) serve her well in giving dignity to humanity in a way that only poems that bear the stamp of necessity can do. There is no other book quite like this one. It’s well worth reading and reading again.