Paper City burns in your hands

Paper City is the bizarre, fascinating, and gloriously perplexing story in prose poetry of "a" and "b," casualties of the fall of "Art." At an "etymological disadvantage," our protagonists' are lucky to have a narrator who is a gifted, clever, and sarcastic wordsmith, one who implicates us in this tale from the get-go:

These are the body's fictions.

They are artless attempts at formalism.

They are mathematically correct and as such of little

interest.

What does it matter whether the sum of one and one is two

and divisible, when one disappears inside the other?

The body's fictions are deliberate

                                               and we are watchful

a and b's "paper city" is a metaphor for art, life, language, poetry, relationships, and even for the very text we are reading. In a sort of pseudo intellectual language that is at moments quite purposefully, almost forcibly erotic, the narrative is propelled forward by constantly surprising itself and the reader —nearly every section concludes with an enticement to continue on to the next, no matter how confusing or bewildering the previous section: "its slow impulse is pow"; "Someone drops a bomb"; "We had found something"; "or"; "Where ? went we went for we were looking for some- / thing we had yet to find."

One of the most rewarding aspects of Paper City is the poet's agility: "Commodify me" becomes "Come modify me;" the conflation of "selfhelpbook"; "We all fall d(r)own." The language is body, the body is language, she tells us, and both are a paper city, constructed from all that Art is and all that it isn't.

In Stephen's bio at the back of the book we are told she writes "in English and French, and sometimes neither." This book is an excellent example, as the story of a and b might be classified as multilingual or even as extra or supra-lingual, with words and phrases in English, in French, and in an intersection between them which is like no language we have seen before, although we understand it viscerally, intuitively.

I admit I didn't understand a lot of this book, even as I was fascinated and impressed by it. I also believe I wasn't meant to, as understanding is almost antithetical to the project that Stephens seems to have assigned herself, that of unraveling or radically altering our sense of logic, of language, of narrative, of body, of desire, of words on paper. She wants the book to burn in our hands and, indeed, it does.