Arte Público Press
November 30, 2026
Trade paperback, 200 pages
$18.95 · ISBN 979-8-89375-046-1
Phantoms
A Memoir by Rima Brusi · Translated by Jessica Powell
"A gorgeously written memoir, Phantoms is a soul-searching exploration of motherhood, abandonment, and spirituality, with a peek into the 1970s Puerto Rico. Rima Brusi's deeply personal work sits alongside Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican as a seminal Caribbean piece of art."
— Lilliam Rivera, author of Tiny Threads
Pre-order
Read more about Rima Brusi →Phantoms begins with a literal phantom, an olfactory hallucination that Rima follows for years, along the way writing an intimate memoir of motherhood, memory, and mind. The book moves through the lives of four generations of women: a great-grandmother with a cigar, a flask of rum, and a deck of briscas; a grandmother of formidable intellect and early death; another with strict rules and small secrets, who raises the author; and, most present and least understood, the strange and estranged mother — luminous, wounding, timid, playful — who becomes her obsession.
Real-life scenes unfold through time: a village scandal, an untreated mental illness, a rock festival, an acid trip, a Santería initiation. Rima's own motherhood, writing, language, and brain are inseparable from her lineage, her island, and the diaspora that pulled her away from it.
The result is a narrative archaeology of the self that holds together the spectral and the material. Rima's voice moves between memory and inquiry, grief and humor, each scene attended to with lyrical precision and without blame.
The English translation by Jessica Powell preserves voice, meaning, and cadence and includes two new chapters written by the author.
Advance Praise
"Rima Brusi's deeply personal work sits alongside Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican as a seminal Caribbean piece of art. Searing and poetic, Phantoms is a must read!"
— Lilliam Rivera, author of Tiny Threads
"An engrossing, original and moving book, written by an author capable of thinking with rigor, remembering with courage and transforming experience into true literature."
— Pedro Cabiya, author of Reinbou and Wicked Weeds
"Brusi is a consummate storyteller — an unsentimental, lucid voice that is at once personable and incisive, demanding yet empathetic… Tender and sharp, it showcases the very best of contemporary Puerto Rican literature."
— Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of CUNY and author of Women in San Juan, 1820-1868
"Brusi offers a gift to the reader: a meditation on what it means to share our piece of the collective memory and on writing itself as an ethics both for life and for art."
— Ana Teresa Toro, author of Secuestro Pulmonar
"Brusi is a stellar writer with a meticulous way of choosing exactly the right word to convey a feeling, an idea, a sensibility."
— Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, co-author of Feminism after 9/11
"An ethnographer of her own life … a tour de force."
— Victoria Sanford, author of Buried Secrets
About the Author
Rima Brusi is a Puerto Rican writer and scholar whose work moves between crónica, essay, ethnography, and applied research. She is the author or co-author of seven books, including the forthcoming Phantoms (Arte Público Press, 2026). Her work has been featured in venues such as The Nation, 80grados, Claridad, The Autoethnographer, CENTRO Journal, Journal of Academic Freedom, and NPR/WNYC. Her book Fantasmas (Editora Educación Emergente, 2019) received the PEN Puerto Rico Premio Nacional in 2020. She is a professor at Northern Arizona University and lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
About the Translator
Jessica Powell is the translator of Pedro Cabiya's Reinbou (Astra House, 2024), Sergio Missana's The Transentients (McPherson & Co., 2021) and Gabriela Wiener's Nine Moons (Restless Books, 2020), a Kirkus Best Nonfiction pick. She received a 2011 NEA Translation Fellowship for Antonio Benítez Rojo's Woman in Battle Dress, later a PEN Center USA finalist. Her translation of Cabiya's Wicked Weeds was a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award.