Paper City

Paper City is built largely in prose-esque paragraphs, with recurrent reference to language and languages (Stephens also writes in French), and with recurrent allusion to logic & linguistics. The work is pervaded by a Beckett-like sense of the despair of living and relating inside a paper/language city (the anxiety of reference), untranslatability, unspeakability. In what one might by now consider a small tradition among younger innovative writers (thinking of Pamala Lu's A Novel) her "characters" are named only by their initals, n and b. A character named "?" also shows up, and one named M. Some of the syntactical complexity, tweaked narrative, and antique vocabulary reminded me periodically of Taylor Brady's book Microclimates. Since n could be Natalie, or could perhaps (in my reading) also function as "neither" versus b for "both" in the classic neither-both logical construction, the prose poems neatly bring forward the question of whether there are other models for narrative besides fiction--what's narrative in logic, what's narrative in linguistic analysis, etc. ? There's also a rich undercurrent of transgressive sexuality and feminisms, a foregrounding of the body, with attendant radical gender questions going on ("Who will speak for the body?" etc.). The prosody is less line by line or word by word than a rhythm back and forth between intelligible content, the appearence of such content, and elusive collapses. Stephens also has a good essay in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, also from Coach House.