Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024. 178 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1-68571-210-5. DOI: 10.53288/05011.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $15.00 in print: paperbound/4.25 X 9.25 in.

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

Lividity

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 a second edition, released as part of punctum’s Special Collections project.

About the First Edition