The Sorrow and the Fast of it

It exists in a middle place: an overlay of indistinct geographies and trajectories. Stephens writes strained between the bodies of Nathalie and Nathanael, between dissolution and abjection, between the borders that limit the body in its built environment–the narrative, splintered and fractured, dislocates its own compulsion. “Stephens is obsessed by breaking free, only to find herself brakeless”

“Only the writer who astonishes language, who dares to tamper with it, is worthy of the epithet,” writes Nathalie Stephens, and she lives up to the challenge she sets—hers is a use of language that alters the language as she uses it. And in her case, this means two languages, as she writes in both English and French, often using one to infiltrate the other, to crack the other open. Often we sense the two languages passing each other, and as they do, a charge arcs from one to the other, making each stand out in sharp relief