Lividity (Trenchart: Surplus) - Softcover

Rosenfield, Kim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934254371 ISBN 13: 9781934254370

Publisher: Les Figues Press, 2012

Synopsis

Poetry. 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 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?

LIVIDITY compels the reader to navigate through language that sinks, coagulates, empties out, and becomes a forensic tool to determine linguistic/poetic cues of movement within or towards a concept of meaning making. Rosenfield's poetry unsettles and disorients, but ultimately examines. It is an analysis, a scientific picking apart of communication and the limits of self expression.

LIVIDITY is published as part of the TrenchArt: Surplus Series, with an introduction by Trisha Low and visual art by Klaus Killisch.

About this title

About the Author

Kim Rosenfield is a poet and psychotherapist. She is the author of GOOD MORNING—MIDNIGHT— (Roof Books, 2002), which was named Small Press Traffic's Book of the Year in 2002, TRÀMA (Krupskaya, 2004), RE: EVOLUTION (Les Figues Press, 2009), LIVIDITY (Les Figues Press, 2012). and USO (I'LL BE SEEING YOU) (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013). Her work has been included in the anthologies Bowery Women (YBK Publishers, Inc., 2006), The GURLESQUE: THE NEW GRRLY, GROTESQUE, BURLESQUE POETICS (Saturnalia Books, 2010), AGAINST EXPRESSION: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONCEPTUAL WRITING (Northwestern University Press, 2011) and I'LL DROWN MY BOOK. She co-founded and co-edited Object magazine (1993-2002) with poet Robert Fitterman. She is part of the artist/writer's collaborative Collective Task (COLLECTIVE TASK, Patrick Lovelace Editions, 2009). Rosenfield lives and works in NYC.

Review

''With Lividity, Kim Rosenfield taps glacial glossa to palatial palate, as 'this endpoint of language comes very close to touching the hard palace.' Penetratingly wry, sensual, and self-reflexive, it entrains the mind with a sculpted spatiality that re-construes and hallucinates all manners of articulation and interlocution. 'They have made it with a richness and expression that we must pay homage to like we pay homage to the indispensible devotion attached to our laboratory of creation...' One other thing. I think it rips through your clothes when it takes you over. Windows found some shredded long johns, but the name tag was missing. They could be anybody's. Nobody... --Lanny Jordan Jackson

Language in Lividity pools in interstitial spaces of not-not-myself. Faced with the extreme everyday, with already-emitted notes we yet melancholically cling to, Rosenfield ignites the awareness that we can never be seamlessly located in our own shell casings, fleshy or otherwise. If, as Robert Creeley so famously asserted, speech is a mouth, here its lips are boiled red.'' ----from the introduction by Trisha Low

Language in Lividity pools in interstitial spaces of not-not-myself. Faced with the extreme everyday, with already-emitted notes we yet melancholically cling to, Rosenfield ignites the awareness that we can never be seamlessly located in our own shell casings, fleshy or otherwise. If, as Robert Creeley so famously asserted, speech is a mouth, here its lips are boiled red. --from the introduction by Trisha Low

Edition details

• Publisher: Les Figues Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1934254371
• ISBN 13: 9781934254370
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 171