Tràma

Kim Rosenfield’s Trama is her first book since the award-winning Good Morning—Midnight— of 2001. Trama is both a festive and a frightening book—Rosenfield has the quiet tones of Geppetto’s Workshop, the mummery of harlequinade, and the terror of the giant swallowing fish. Trama, she says, “embodies a child’s tale but redesigns it to pit the mistranslated circus of personal ambition against public episodes of wronged military might. Trama is slippery too: it is upended and equipped with reflectors, so that the reader seems to be looking straight ahead, but is really peering down and in to a shadow-box picture of an Italian hill town. Trama should be thought of as being carried by two itinerant showmen, in a big flat box.”

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Kim Rosenfield narrates the trajectory of “an unluxurious piece of wood” in a unique language whose inflections have an exhilarating effect. Her Trama is a dance of the elements charged with a keen sense of the absurd. — Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Put this on the shelf (oh but please take it off again) next to Ashbery’s Girls on The Run, the book-length proses of Carla Harryman and Stacy Doris, and your DVDs of Guy Maddin, L’Atalante and Wladyslaw Starewicz’s The Mascot—fairy tales creepier to adults who know a thing or two about “ammonia and advice,” and perhaps less about keeping balance in a world of eternal, Buffy-style recurrence. Rosenfield’s part collage, part suede and suave therapeutic technique creates a “voice” that wavers, furtive yet spikily resonant in the amplified tick of the second hand, as the carnal “self” is further contaminated by the freezer-burn of a world run by patents, portents, and hawkish impatience, yet begs to extend its lease with the mirror stage. Read this book for its honey and ash, and sleep easier. — Brian Kim Stefans

This deceitfully comedic tale is one of terroristic proportions, like a Cocteau film sent through the tortuous digestives of a black widow's belly… “Was it borne of someone?” While the “poor little guys” and “little dear ones” act steadily to sublimate the violently enchanting surroundings, the scene somehow becomes all the more de-sublimated. How does this happen? What a predicament! Kim Rosenfield’s narrative circuits take us on a romp through the psychic forms of our “civilian” lives. “Dear men, my lines.” Dear reader, step lively! — Laura Elrick