Poetry. "WE PRESS OURSELVES PLAINLY is a particularly affecting development in an already virtuosic, Ovidian body of work because it renews and makes newly visible crucial continuities: between Continental and North American Postmodernism, the Nouveau Roman and New Narrative, WWII and Operation Enduring Freedom. From out of agile and Celinian ellipses, Nathalie Stephens creates an asynchronous, transnational 'discordance...in time,' a hugely amplified recent past whose familiarity haunts us not as nostalgia but as trauma. 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,' Nathalie Stephens puts 'holes...where there were none' as a way of underscoring that there's nothing inevitable about gender or genre or violence, just as 'What is inevitable is not the war but the language that determines the war.' As grim as Beckett, as moral as Genet, as seductive as Durasᰬyet this book moves me like no other"—Brian Teare.
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA
Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) writes l'entre-genre in English and French. She is the author of a dozen books including ABSENCE WHERE AS (CLAUDE CAHUN AND THE UNOPENED BOOK) (Nighboat Books, 2009), AT ALBERTA (BookThug, 2008), THE SORROW AND THE FAST OF IT (Nightboat Books, 2007), TOUCH TO AFFLICTION (Coach House, 2006), PAPER CITY (Coach House, 2003), Je Nathanaël (l'Hexagone, 2003) and L'Injure (l'Hexagone, 2004), a finalist for the 2005 Prix Alain-Grandbois and Prix Trillium. JE NATHANAËL exists in English self-translation (BookThug, 2006). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian (Paradox Publishing, 2007). In addition to translating herself, Stephens has translated works by Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, Bhanu Kapil, and Sina Queyras.
Reviews and Other Links
Christina Mengert @ The Constant Critic
J. Mae Barizo @ Tarpaulin Sky Reviews