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Touch To Affliction
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 Górecki, 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.
Acclaimed poet Nathalie Stephens walks among these ruins, calling out to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Górecki, 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.
- GenresPoetry
200 pages, Paperback
First published September 30, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 7, 2017
Inspiring and provoking the imagination
Stephens: j'adore - poetry confused in being a prose, this is a fleshy bodily work of repetitive signs-metaphors (city, body-to-the-bone, language), reinvented, reimagined with every new line of the book.
Stephens: j'adore - poetry confused in being a prose, this is a fleshy bodily work of repetitive signs-metaphors (city, body-to-the-bone, language), reinvented, reimagined with every new line of the book.
February 17, 2008
More of a book long sequence than a collection of poems. While things are broken up by titles here and there, each longer piece is in dialogue with the others, sharing the same prose-y form and similar sets of images/concerns (What is a city? What is language? etc.)
There are some blistering, intriguing passages:
City is stone, yes, but it is stone that is worn. It is skin that falls away from bone. It is the thing we go toward. It is the thing and that is all. We haven't a name for it. It is that maddening. It is that forlorn.
There are also some that are maddeningly obscure:
Juan Bourla is a voice recorded on paper. A room filled with smoke. History is provocation. His mouth is greedy for sleep. To Lise he is a body in shadow. To Simone de Beauvoir he is what remains unseen.
This is the first and last time these folks appear. Maybe (due to my ignorance) the names of these philosophers becomes window dressing when used too often.
There are some blistering, intriguing passages:
City is stone, yes, but it is stone that is worn. It is skin that falls away from bone. It is the thing we go toward. It is the thing and that is all. We haven't a name for it. It is that maddening. It is that forlorn.
There are also some that are maddeningly obscure:
Juan Bourla is a voice recorded on paper. A room filled with smoke. History is provocation. His mouth is greedy for sleep. To Lise he is a body in shadow. To Simone de Beauvoir he is what remains unseen.
This is the first and last time these folks appear. Maybe (due to my ignorance) the names of these philosophers becomes window dressing when used too often.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews