Napoleon's Mare

A woman writes by cutting words and animal pictures from newspapers and magazines. By joining the pictured with "the words for which they are longing," she makes balance out of chaos. Napoleon's Mare, thirteen chapters and a section of prose poems, is a diatribe, a discontinuous narrative - as much about writing as about the bewildering process of constructing a self. A woman performs her own cesarean. High school girls are erasing the skin on their hands. A commune goes to court for custody of a lesbian's child. These pieces of story are adhesive, pressing. The narrator's faith in the power of words to shape change is countermanded by the evidence of the damage words can cause - their separate existence apart from the best intentions. At the same time, it is their separate existence that entrances her.