“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 ... Read moreone 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.”—Cole Swenson “Though Touch to Affliction waltzes with the tides of violence, Nathalie Stephens writes without fear or compromise, ‘brazen and stumbling.’ Touch to Affliction is a clean, stone Madonna, buckled and rife with violence and the possibility of exultation.”—Meg Hurtado, Verse Show Less