There is a particular pleasure in encountering the unclassifiable -- and as a reader, it happens so rarely. One knows the book's genre at the very least, or someone has recommended it because it's similar to other books you've liked. Enter "Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay," a small book put out by the incomparable Sarabande Books, by T. Fleischmann: a complex, tightly wound (and wounded) cri de coeur that is simultaneously accessible and intensely, cryptically personal.

To describe this strange, beautiful book does it a disservice: "Syzygy, Beauty," is an essay composed of 102 paragraph bursts that veer wildly in subject and tone -- none save one longer than a single page. Some are prose poems, some are disquisitions on art, some fiercely address and confront an ethereal lover with longing. The narrative through-line is twofold: the construction of a house in the woods and the arc of a complicated relationship.

But it's the thematic through-lines, more obscure, that give this small book its heft and hint at a deeper complexity. "If I were a boy you would love me and also, I am angry because you think I am a boy," the speaker says to his lover. "My body is not a male body except in the sense that it is male."

Syzygy refers to the alignment of celestial bodies in astronomy, repeating relationships in mathematics and male/female pairings in Gnosticism. It's impossible to articulate the way language crashes into itself here, reforms, returns; but it's the singular pleasure of this essay, and you begin to find your footing as a reader as totems and signifiers recur. The speaker is articulating the deep tensions he feels within him/herself: the question of gender; the tension between transparency and occultation; the desire for shelter against a definition of home as "not a sanctuary, but an enclosure ... where you risk yourself."

Questions are raised, but not resolved.

So what is this book about? I'll guess: tension, alignment; risk, release. And the creative beauty found in that tautness. "When you came to the mountain farm my legs were rashed red by chiggers and the sun slipped quickly behind the ridge." "In a field in Michigan, the dead dry grass is in a permanent sway, pointing the way the snow drifts." And, simply, "Touch is the conclusion of sight."

"I'll build us a house of paper," the speaker promises, and he's done exactly that. Near the end of this extended essay, advising his lover in the reading of the Gnostic texts, he writes: "Treat it like some thoughts on our love, ignore the parts that don't work for you." That is good advice for reading this work as well. One doesn't need to catch every reference to leave jarred, changed by the encounter, though certainly you'd be rewarded for putting in the time, for reading with a pen, for trying to unearth the meaning you didn't even know was there.

Ethan Rutherford's short-story collection, "The Peripatetic Coffin," will be published next year by Ecco Press.