Works by
Nathalie Stephens
(Poet, Writer)

Books

• Hivernale (1995)
  Long poem

• This Imagined Permanence (1996)
  Poetic narrative

• Colette m'entends-tu? (1997)
  Poetic narrative

• Underground (1999) -- Finalist 2000 Grand Prix du Salon du livre de Toronto
  Fiction

• Somewhere Running (2000)
  Poetry

• L'embrasure (2002)
  Poetic narrative

• Je Nathanaël (2003, L'Hexagone [French edition]; 2006, BookThug [English self-translation]
  Je Nathanaël is an endangered text. Neither essay nor poem nor novel nor sex-show, what it takes from language it gives back to the body. Through Nathanaël, Andre Gide's absent, imagined and much desired apprentice in Les nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the Earth), this text explores ways in which language constrains the body, shackles it to gender, and proposes instead an altogether different way of reading, where words are hermaphroditic and in turn transform desire (consequence). Suggesting that one body conceals another, Je Nathanaël lends an ear to this other body and delights in the anxiety it provokes.

• Paper City (2003)
  In a Paper City write nothing down. So commands this text, which dismantles itself as it charts its own admonished course, navigating the interstices between English and French, the author’s two mother tongues. Through the disquieting absence of the letter characters n and b, and the narrator’s attempt to uncover and record their lives, Stephens confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatability of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences. Beneath this thin narrative runs an undercurrent of horror that decries the deliberate plunder of the City resulting from an absolute disregard for history’s relationship to the body’s fictions – what n and b term ‘art lost to numbers.’

• L'Injure (2004) -- Finalist 2005 Prix Alain-Grandbois; Finalist 2005 Prix Trillium

• Touch To Affliction (2006) -- Finalist, 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
  We are walking backwards into our lives. Our cities are incensed. They fester on our thighs. And we lick at them in garish immoderate delight.
  
  When colour comes we run. We have no idea why.
  
  From the ruins of poetry, fiction and philosophy comes Touch To Affliction, a meditation on the notion of homeland, on patrie and the inhumanity that arises from it.
  
  This is a text obsessed with ruins: the ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body. The history of the twentieth century is a history of barbarism, and Stephens walks, like a flâneur, through its midst, experiencing through her own body the crumbled buildings, the dessicated cities, the eviscerated language and humanity of our time, calling out in passing to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Gorecki, Simone Weil. In the end, it considers what we are left with – indeed, what is left of us – as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.
  
  Insistently political but never polemical, Touch To Affliction, at the interstices of thought and the unnameable, is at once lament, accusation and elegy.

• L'Absence au lieu (Claude Cahun et le livre inouvert) (2007 release)

• All Boy (2001)
  Poems

• There Is No Object Between Us (2001)

• What Exile This (2002)
  Long poem

• Grammaire des sens (2002)

• Species : Ex(hib)it (2003)

• Held (2004)

• The Small Body With It Rises From Under (2005)

• A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning (2004) by Catherine Mavrikakis, Translated by Nathalie Stephens
  Hervé, the friend with AIDS; his lover, Hervé, also afflicted; Hervé the hairdresser; Hervé next door who has defenestrated himself: in A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning the narrator confronts the deaths of so many friends, all named Hervé. But the dead cannot be buried so easily; they live on spectres haunting her, as the cumulative effect of all her Hervés becomes a multifaced Death that simultaneously angers, saddens, cheers and confuses her.
  
  In this unfolding series of encounters between the living and the dead, Mavrikakis draws on Deleuze, Freud, Foucault and novelist Hervé Guibert to make of herself and of this visceral, compelling novel a kind of living mausoleum where those unable to speak my still be heard.