Definition of "contortive" []

• Showing contortion. (adjective)

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• "Then, with a contortive shudder, he rolled over and over the steps, and lay face downward upon the ground-dead."
• "In the Guardian today, progressive paladin Ken Gude - the Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress, no less - gives us a bravura display of the contortive arts in rationalizing the new Leader's decision to keep quashing evidence of American torture."
• "The problem is that not enough of this contortive plot is realised as vivid or vital writing on the page; the novel feels gestural, assembled, a simulacra with neither the power that such subject matter should pack nor the prose-master persuasiveness that another structurally playful author - Nabokov, say - might deploy."