[REVIEW] X Marks the Dress: A Registry, by Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess

XMarkstheDressCover
Goldwake Press
102 pages/ $15.95

Review by Carlo Matos

X Marks the Dress, a wonderful and entertaining collaboration between Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess, takes the shape of a registry: the marriage, so to speak, of ritual and consumerism; that is, the economic reinforcement of the hetero-normative traditions and social conventions that govern and limit marriage practices. A registry is, of course, first and foremost a collection of things. In previous books, Kristina Marie Darling has explored how the things that remain from failed relationships can bury, bind or enslave the beloved and how those individual items are culturally situated along the lines of gender and power. Darling says in an interview at heavy feather review that she wanted to “defamiliarize many of the objects, rituals and conventions associated with weddings,” and I think Darling and Guess have succeeded in accomplishing that goal without getting too bogged down in polemic.

In Appendix A, there is a footnote that references an “autobiographical novel [that] depicts a heroine’s pursuit of an alternative to marriage, particularly the social conventions governing the ceremony itself.” The authors very plainly play with the notion that marriage means man-and-wife. I have to admit to my great consternation that it was far too easy for me to simply assume that the marriage was between a woman and a man. In fact, it seems to me that the book is calculated to lure the reader into this too-easy assumption in order to, like Ibsen loved to do to his audiences in the nineteenth-century, jar us into recognition. The duo is actually a trio: “I’m tired of threeways where no one gets fucked” (“[Wedding Favor: Coin Purse]”). The male figure is transgender: “I can’t keep my two lives together much longer. Once the M on my license goes missing, our marriage dissolves: two women mean nothing” (“Pearl-handled Letter Opener”). The female character had a secret second wedding: “Darling, you know how my mother and father rejected me? . . . Well, I told my parents I was marrying a man. I hired an actor to play my husband” (“Pizza”). Continue reading

[REVIEW] Only More So, by Millicent Borges Accardi

~ by Carlo Matos

 

Salmon Press, forthcoming 2014

105 pages, €12

 

Millicent Borges Accardi is a Portuguese-American poet and the author of Injuring Eternity (World Nouveau) and Woman on a Shaky Bridge (Finishing Line Press).  She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts, the California Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Foundation, and CantoMundo, among others.  In her second full-length collection of poems, Only More So, Accardi plays her themes like a jazz musician. A theme is introduced and then abandoned.  A new theme makes itself felt and then slowly, cautiously—like the great jazz improvisers that are littered throughout the text: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Wes Montgomery—the first theme reappears, altered but recognizable, trilling towards the next image or, like all good music, towards the anxiety of silence.  Poetry and music, it goes without saying, have a way of approaching silence without ever reaching it, like Zeno’s paradox where the math approaches zero without ever really getting there.  And yet, somehow, despite the numbers—despite the silence—we still arrive at the finish line a little shocked and surprised to be there.

Only More So is a collection of lyric poems about jazz and sex, gender and marriage, the Holocaust and silence—music, violence, war, rape, and silence again.  Accardi weaves jazz imagery throughout the text.  Sometimes jazz is the theme itself, sometimes it is a bridge to a new theme, other times it is an echo in the clarinet section that threatens to develop then fades.  For example, in “For John, For Coltrane,” Accardi describes how the music used Coltrane’s body, aged him,

“made trying
harder than a man ought to into just
silence, made it seem just
for the silence of it all.” Continue reading