Donna Stonecipher
Souvenir de Constantinople
ISBN 09679854-5-9
14 dollars

Souvenir de Constantinople is a seductively paced travelogue—both exotic and erotic—where traveler is lover and tourist, materialist and pilgrim, voyeur and poseur and where the self is bartered in exchange for a glimpse of otherness—couplets of coupling neither arriving nor staying put—no home, no self—just the consumption of "Turkish Delight," a fantasy of imperialist candy and a lover's pet-name—Words are visited as sites of otherness—translations of absent bodies—mystagogic etymological geomancy—the impossible quest for self and other was never so luxurious—the letter home never more admirably addressed.

--Martin Corless-Smith