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Wilson continued from previous page historically informed reading of poetry "beyond the prosody wars." It is a study accessible to academics and casual readers alike, unburdened by jargon and enamored of its subject. One possibility this volume's title implicitly proposes may be whether poetry and criticism might regain a wider audience if more writers balanced sophistication with clarity, seriousness with enthusiasm, as Caplan surely has. James Matthew Wilson is a Sarin Research Fellow at the University ofNotre Dame. His poems, reviews, and essays appear in manyjournals, including Contemporary Poetry Review. The Poem and Le Poème Paula Koneazny Touch to Affliction Nathalie Stephens Coach House Books http://www.chbooks.com 80 pages; paper, S 1 3.95 Canadian poet Nathalie Stephen's latest book, Touch to Affliction, suspends the reader in a state of in-betweenness: between languages, between cities, between "I" and "you"— a diffuse hermaphroditism that reaches beyond the "facts" of sex and gender to the writing of poetry itself. One outcome of this paradoxical and fraught condition is "Le Poème Afflig é," one in which "Affliction is the blood ofpoetry" and "the poet must make language into two things simultaneously: sobriety and passion." In the poems collected here, language reveals itself as a series of nesting dolls, with one word or meaning nestled (or nailed) inside another. For Stephens, the "inside" language, immediate and close to die body, is French, while English is "[t]he language in which I write. The language that sets my body against itself. And dismantles the present." This may be a partial truth, however, since, although English predominates throughout the book, French intervenes in many guises—as word, phrase, even etymological double entendre—and inhabits this poet's English. For example, in "Finitude Lamentation " she writes, "I rue die many avenues of suffering but can name none." Readers are meant to notice that, in French, the noun "rue" translates as "street" and the verb "ruer" as "kick" or "lash out," while the English verb means to repent or regret. "Avenue" is "avenue" in both languages, however, and is ofcourse a kind of street. Stephens presents here a sly demonstration of how knowledge of more than one language increases exponentially the amount and complexity ofwordplay a poet can engage in. The notion of disembodied language invites the French feminists (Julia Kristeva and Simone de Beauvoir are mentioned in the text) into Stephens's poems. The writings ofHélène Cixous seem especially pertinent here, with her call for an embodied "écriture féminine" and her positing of a universal bisexuality. Stephens demands in turn. "Where is the poet who will return language to the body? // Where is the body that is prepared to receive language?" The relationship of body and language becomes even more complicated as Stephens thinks/speaks/writes in multiple languages that will not exactly translate one into the other. She says. "In another language I would say: Désincarné. But I would not say: Disembodied," and "Le corps is not the same as corpse." Touch to Affliction begins with an unusual epigraph as prelude, a fragment of the music score of "Already It Is Dusk" from String Quartet No. I, Opus 62, by the Polish composer Henryk Mikofaj Górecki. The notation "Ferocissimo-Furioso-Marcatissimo" proves to be prescient as an introduction to the poems that follow. For there is a ferocity in Stephens's writing , and all the fury of the twenty-first century urban wanderer, great-granddaughter perhaps of Walter Benjamin's flâneur, who walks streets and traverses bridges in cities both inundated and gone up in flames. Which cities? Toronto? Montréal? Paris? All cities? "The city catches fire. // And we are in it," and "We will drown in the city and we will take our languages with us." These are cities in intimate relation to the body, cities mat "fester on our thighs." Paradoxically, the city that grows out of the body also transgresses against it. In the poems collected here, language reveals itselfas a series ofnesting dolls. Wandering from poem to poem among the ruins, Stephens presents us with a recurring image/thought, "the small body," that almost resembles an allegorical character in...

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