Paper City 1st ed Edition

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Praise for nathalie stephens\'s previous books: \'Her deft starts and stops are telegraphic, unrelenting, creating spaces of speech, silence, listening, craning, resistance, wonder and danger\'.-Erin Moure \'nathalie stephens\'s poetry vibrates with beauty and a dangerous, delicious, cut-glass tension. Because it tells the truth, many people will find [This Imagined Permanence]discomforting or even threatening. Good, I\'m all for stopping gentle readers cold in their tracks\'. - R.M. VaughanPoetry. Prose. \"In a Paper City write nothing down.\" So commands this text, which dismantles itself as it charts its own admonished course, navigating the interstices between English and French, Stephens\' own mother tongues. Through the disquieting absence of the letter characters \"n\" and \"b,\" the narrator\'s attempt to uncover and record their lives, Stephens confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatability of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences. Beneath this thin narrative runs an undercurrent of horror that decries the deliberate plunder of the City resulting from an absolute disregard for history\'s relationship to \"the body\'s fictions\"- what both \"n\" and \"b\" terms \"art lost to numbers.\"