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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 fl̢neur, 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 Рindeed, what is left of us Рas both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.

Insistently political but never polemical, Touch To Affliction, at the interstices of thought and theunnameable, is at once lament, accusation and elegy.

Praise for Paper City:

‘Understanding is almost antithetical to the project 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.’

– NewPages

“Sometimes this town is too damn small,” writes Heather Pyrcz. Yet Town Limits, her first collection of poetry, is anything but frustrated by the geographical boundaries of its small town Nova Scotia setting. In her writing, Pyrcz shifts smoothly from community to family to intimacy, always finding focus in the strange mix of irony, beauty and truth that envelopes her world.

The poems in Tracery enact a lyric condensation. Many of them were written in transit: on the bus, on a bicycle, on foot, in the endless to and fro of work life. Their lyric brevity allowed composition directly in the brain, or quick jottings in a pocket notebook, primarily governed by the music of reason – “the ear’s judgement” (Joachim du Bellay), the “natural music” of poetry (Eustache Deschamps), “music at the heart of thinking” (Fred Wah). A major feature of this work is its incorporation and reworking – a translation – of other works of western literature and philosophy across the span of its brief, localized history. These are poems that barge into the arena of classic and modernist literary works with little regard for what is generally regarded as genius, with contempt for the ever-present misogyny and gender segregation of our collective past, with an ever-present critique, but also with a constantly renewable sense of wonder and humility. Written in a time of plagues, through dreams and daily life, these are poems to be enjoyed by anyone who observes events occurring in time, and then wonders at them.