"A history of the world told by a sinuous phantom presence, by turns personal, plural, anonymous, brilliant in its aphoristic aim, despairing, unstoppable. This is a book about the survival of intuition, a real-life miracle each of us has occasion to witness but which has seldom been described so adeptly and ardently."
–Lucy Ives, author of Impossible Views of the World "In Phantom Captain, Kim Rosenfield is at the top of her game. These poems make me feel uneasy. They churn with efforts at sense-making that always fall apart. They give me that swervy feeling you get when a car hits a bump in the road that's more like a mini-ramp and your tummy goes 'wooosh' with the precipitous dip back to earth. The bounce of physics, but emotionally, the language of that; psychological whiplash; finding your associations false; thinking with the shredding environment; the texture of panic; the fantasy of animal equilibrium; the joke of trying to make oneself whole in a culture of ephemeralization; affect as wind pattern; the gross hilarity of aging; the defensiveness of trying not to die. From the shadowy caverns of human experience, something that defies direct description emerges here through Rosenfield's adept elisions, wild logics, and brilliant, catastrophic failures to make it all make sense."
–Kristen Gallagher, author of 85% True/Minor Ecologies"In detonating whispers and sinuous roars, the six poems of Kim Rosenfield's Phantom Captain summon the "casino of possibilities" that flood the gap between self and self-understanding. In the candid, encompassing lines and sentences that comprise this staggering book, Rosenfield captures the oceanic effects of this supposed self's disassembly: its unmooring diffusion, its buoyant plight; and the dueling currents of gall and love that sustain it." –Shiv Kotecha, author of The Switch
"Exuberant and emotional, playfully and plaintively raging, disruptive ribald and Rabelaisian polyvocal philosophical machinations, a performance that collapses corporeal boundaries in a collective post Anthropocene space where "Alles hat ein Ende nur die Wurst hat zwei = Everything has one end, only the sausage has two.'"
Phantom Captain contains multitudes.
–Erica Baum, author of Dog Ear"in-ef-fa-ble: The only word to describe the experience of reading Phantom Captain.Kim takes you on a journey that is familiar, strange, unknowing and thrilling."
–Steven Cox and Daniel Silver, founders of Duckie Brown"In Kim Rosenfield's Phantom Captain, language visually folds in on itself. One note turns into another inside the politics, the psychology, the consumption, the subtle groping fingers of American aggression, loneliness, space, and desire, winding its way back to the private, relational and cosmic in sneaky bent ways. Rosenfield spreads a clear, creased pall over infinitesimal glass cities of American despair and groping desire. Her writing body is layered, packing much of the 20th century into the 21st in that angling, hopeful, sexless, (in some ways) "personality" that so many of us have built as cover. I love this work!"
–Asher Hartman, author of Purple Electric Play!"Kim Rosenfield's
Phantom Captain charts an archipelago of language in the ocean of unnamed emotional life by playfully collaging together aphoristic metaphors, quotidian expressions of phrase, phenomenology and psychoanalysis with daringly bald lyric address. In these "intersubjective processes between subject and biographer," "mate" and "captain," herein, the voice of the poem emerges out of the rigorous labor of unfurling knowing's certainty."
–Holly Melgard, author of Fetal Position"When Kim Rosenfield writes that she wants "the ineffable experience of the limitless infinite and the unthought known and forms of not knowing," she says so in a voice that threads between all the known shades of affect. It's a singer's voice, intimate and impersonal, vibing on epistemology, Nietzsche, and the most gloriously fecund perfume ever conjured in prose. A thrilling and contrarian read."
–Marina Rosenfeld, composer of Teenage Lontano On Good Morning, Midnight (winner of Small Press Traffic's Book of the Year Award):
"New York poet Kim Rosenfield finds the pivot where body image, conspicuous consumption, self-esteem, and "dome parties at Vassar" form a crushing day-for-night. With withering linguistic looks and razor-sharp wit, Rosenfield deconstructs the sets of beliefs that hold media-created woman together." –Publishers Weekly
