Touch To Affliction

(Paperback)

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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.

Author Bio

Nathalie Stephens writes entre-genre in English and French. She is the author of a dozen books, including Paper City (Coach House, 2003), Je Nathanael (Bookthug, 2006), and L'Injure (L'Hexagone, 2004), a finalist for the Prix Alain-Grandbois and the Prix Trillium. Stephens lives in Chicago.