Few indications support anything so gauche as a 'first person' voice or experience. The sense that this is a performance for textual voyeurs is supported by gestures towards an emerging dramatic scenario. But the writing never quite loses its formalist dignity to the extent of becoming a naturalist theatre. This tour de force performs its variations as if to suggest the plenitude from which the rest of the book's more singular moments of text were selected. A note in the colophon material states that this comes from a collaborative text-sound installation.
Performative potential is evident.
The rest of the text remains labile and yet exacting, generating the appearance of playful indifference to the framing rules of the text while maintaining a cool, formal decorum. The delayed emergence of conventional words amid staged enjambment comes to seem too arch, as if nervous with more stable sentiments and happier with typographical disjunction than the pleasures of lusher textures. The reader's agency comes back to the 'doll' that is or is not 'mine'. The underlying question is the relation between moments of performed transgression and the sense that there are scripts more powerful than dreamt of in the agency of performativity. The difficulty of moving beyond essentialist conceptions of the 'subject' is a familiar problem in queer theory.