“As Tricia Low alludes in the title of her short preface, Rosenfield’s book is a kind of autopsy. And whereas the poet’s will-to-collapse, to enfold voices, to same the different, will still be seen by some as an aggressive perversion against subjective difference, I would argue that it is exactly this calculated objectification that marks the book as so seductively and brutally contemporary.”—Nick Thurston, author of Reading the Remove of Literature and Of the Subcontract
In Lividity, poet Kim Rosenfield works within the outskirts of language, draining it of connotation and excess. Using words and phrases culled from linguistics textbooks and language-learning manuals, Rosenfield invites the reader to experience the everyday vernacular as dislocated affect. What happens when language acts as organ donor? When language, the conveyor of our vulnerability, is transposed into new and often failing terrain? Are expressions of meaning vital enough to keep the organism functioning? What happens when meaning loses its moorings?
This title is released as an open access second edition as part of punctum’s Special Collections project.
Kim Rosenfield is a poet and psychotherapist. She is the author of several books of poetry, including USO: I’ll Be Seeing You (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014). She is the 2023 recipient of the FENCE Ottoline Prize. Her latest book, Phantom Captain, was published by FENCE in 2023. Rosenfield is an originating member of the international artist/writers collective, Collective Task. Her clinical writing can be found in Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
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