Bøger af Nathalie Stephens

Touch to Affliction is a text of ruins: ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body, of the barbarism of the twentieth century. At once lament, accusation and elegy, this work articulates the crumbling of buildings, the evisceration of language, the inhumanity that arises from patrie.Acclaimed poet Nathalie Stephens walks among these ruins, calling out to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Grecki, Simone Weil. In the end, this work considers what we are left with indeed, what is left of us as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.Touch to Affliction is political but never polemical. It lives at the interstices of thought and the unnameable. It is a book for our times.

Through the disquieting absence of the letters characters n and b, and the narrator's attempt to uncover and record their lives, this book confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences.

Among 'immaculate and catastrophic' ruins and lacunae, having forgotten 'the sentence for behaving,' the narrator embarks upon an 'adverse and objectionable' litany of a history whose abjections yield a kind of nihilistic courage: 'Hope is for martyrs.' Given that now 'even the fictions are fictions.'