“The paradox of self-knowledge (how can the the perceiver—a subject—become the perceived—an object—without becoming something other than itself?) seems to mirror the paradox of time (what can we say of the present instant before it is already past?). The self, as well as time, is a ‘stranger to the direct gaze,’ as Martin Corless-Smith puts it in his mesmerizing new volume. Here, Romantic discourses on the soul are playfully and obliquely reconstituted via intertextual strategies worthy of Borges and Jabès. In a work crossed by alternate selves and alternate literary histories, Corless-Smith brilliantly evokes the mystery and melancholia of being in time.”—Andrew Joron