Speculative Patient: Poems. This item is unavailable.Speculative Patient: Poems

Landscaped with caves and cages, ghosts and ocean, fires and stars and God, Peter Feng's Speculative Patient is a descent into the innerness of inner worlds. A struggle with the shadow self. The wordless unconscious conjured paradoxically with words. Yet the visions are clear-eyed, the phrasing expressive. Anxiety and acceptance coexist. Yet in spite of these poems concerning themselves with the abstract and unknowable, their humanity lingers warm on the periphery: "I am not sure if I am still alive / or only a mental projection. . . / The walls are glowing hairy / and there’s sound of water in the rocks."

Peter Feng is Associate Professor of English at Qingdao University, China. He is particularly interested in finding out how poetry helps us access alternative realities (possible modes of being) by working through both Freudian and Heideggerian versions of the uncanny toward a new conception of the poetic, which is based on continuous, deep transactions with psychic and political potentials of the contemporary subject. He has published essays on Paul Celan, W. S. Merwin, Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats, and Emmanuel Levinas. He is the author of Parallel Tongues (Showwe, 2015), The Desert Swimmer (Pulsasir, 2015), and Cruel Raven (Nanjing University Press, 2011).