Nathalie Stephens

Three from Coach House Books

Adam Golaski

Nathalie Stephens

Touch to Affliction

Christian Bök

Crystallography

A. Rawlings

Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists

It is fitting that Stephen’s book opens with the looping and layered string quartet of Gorecki’s “Already It is Dusk” as Touch to Affliction applies the same sonic qualities, the repetition of notes, staffs, phrases, words, woven on top of and into each other. The poetry here is a music stripped of the ideal of the pop chorus as the anchor of a song.

Touch to Affliction by Nathalie Stephens. Coach House Books, $16.95.

Reviewed by Meg Hurtado

With Touch to Affliction, Nathalie Stephens explores the poet-as-trespasser. Her speaker wanders through a world to which she clearly feels entitled (she intimately references the train stations and street corners of this poetically consecrated world).

Nathalie Stephens has published two books this year: the English auto-translation of Je Natahanael (BookThug; $15) and Touch To Affliction (Coach House; $17). These aren't collections of poems so much as poetic books. In some ways, each book continues where the last one ended, creating a cumulative narrative.

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: