Phantom Captain

Kim Rosenfield

Fence

Kim Rosenfield's PHANTOM CAPTAIN explores the poetry of psychoanalysis, feminism and gender, questions of the 21st century self, and the accelerating pressures of standardizing capitalism upon the human mind.

Kim Rosenfield places the funhouse mirror of the psychoanalytic endeavor in full-frontal view, without sugar-coating and without filters, inviting readers to participate in deep-diving investigations. Psychic provocations are laid bare while being surrounded by the honest warmth in Rosenfield's voice. Rosenfield's poems are simultaneously mature, fresh, and energetic, breaking through the newly creeping American homogenizations, exposing the everydayness of all that oppresses the mind and voice: "the shit you smell / just might be your own." In six irregular and ambitious sections, Rosenfield offers a path of transcendent survival: one that protects human intuition and improvisation.

Poetry. Women's Studies.

"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