Reviewing the work of Micheline Aharonian Marcom is likely to leave one searching for words. Each of her books has been newly, bravely bewildering, in ways that are almost beyond paraphrase. That is, these texts assert such stylistic strength that they seem to resist the language of criticism, or any language other than their own. How can writing so poetically self-reliant, so set apart from our “ordinary” discourse, be faithfully described, let alone criticized, from outside? Confronted with this kind of writing, any review—any act of writing about—could run the risk of redundancy.
