And the Heavens Shall Part positions itself, from the outset, against confining the present, against impoverishing language, and against reducing existence to mere immediacy. When Christine Rebourg-Roesler states, in her preamble, "Speaking, writing, is scratching away the licorice lacquer of the night and emerging out of nothingness into animated forms," she is describing more than just an act of writing; she is articulating a poetics of openness, wherein speech becomes the site of a potential transfiguration of reality. The metaphor of "scraping away" the night lends the act of writing a quasi-mineral, tactile quality—as if language were tasked with tearing darkness away from the world to bring a form into being.
