Rice's gorgeous prose stutters and sings by turns. Words cascade in syncopated rhythms. Pronouns shift in gender, person, and number. Sentences break into fragments. Phrases proliferate in kaleidoscopic patterns.
Language is intensely carnal.
This gets in the way of meaning. Scattering frozen syllables, lost, on the floor, words were arrested, made to suffer on her tongue. The word becomes flesh, and suffers a kind of Passion. Cosmic confusion ensues. There's no way to distinguish between the genders.