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

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”).

The book has a four-part structure, each part a layer of a wedding cake. The first section is a series of linked prose poems; the second section (Appendix A) is made up of footnotes to two absent texts, endnotes, a glossary, and an index. Section 3 (Appendix B) is another series of prose poems, labeled a “Dictionary of Nuptial Slang.” The final section (Appendix C) is an erasure of the prose poems in section 1. In the same heavy feather interview, Carol Guess states, “Kristina and I wrote the first section first, then realized we’d crafted a narrative, complete with plot arc. So we wanted to unravel that arc in the remaining sections.” And unravel they do like the lace trim of the fleeing bride in the final footnote of the book: “The guests could hear her dress rustling as she walked away from the altar. Even then, the white lace trim had begun to unravel.” There is, however, a secondary and opposite force that is always trying to mend the narrative, to reduce the marriage to something more conventionally acceptable by undoing its complexity. It’s difficult to resist substituting the prose poems in the first section of the book for the missing primary texts in Appendix B. It’s a nice bait and switch, a clever variation on the kind of thing Darling has been doing in previous books by using academic structures as alternative poetic forms. In my opinion, it goes one step further than Paul Fournel’s Suburbia (where I first encountered a text made up entirely of the paraphernalia attending a main text that is missing) because the desire to attach the footnotes in Appendix B to the narrative arc of the preceding prose poems is almost overmastering—and, of course, this is quite deliberate on the part of our authors. And they only further strengthen my desire to transplant the prose poems into the space of the missing text by then erasing those very poems in Appendix C. For example, in one of my favorite poems, “Unworn Garter,” Darling and Guess present us with a bride who would like to be different, so she wears blue rather than white, carries dead leaves instead of flowers and serves beets instead of cake, but ultimately she pays for her originality: “She decided on a tattoo that looked exactly like a satin garter. When the time came he knelt and she lifted. He scraped at her thigh while she gritted her teeth.” On the one hand, this poem shows a character trying to make over the ritual for herself; on the other hand, it shows that her attempt is a failure. The institution as it is currently defined reaffirms itself, reestablishes its normative power.

Carol Guess also stated she was baffled by “customs like wedding registries and bachelor parties” (heavy feather review) and this book seems to be her attempt to test the boundaries of these constructs. In the end, it seems the best or maybe only alternative to marriage as it is currently understood may be to avoid it altogether. In the final section, entitled “What Survived the Housefire,” “I was stolen” stands alone on a page, as does the titular “X.” X marks the spot; we have arrived, but the arrival is really a departure, a bride fleeing from the proverbial ball and chain: “At this shop [Ball & Chain] they strapped a metal ball to the ankle of the bride-to-be. There were different finishes to the metal.” Polish it all you like, our poets seem to be suggesting, but a marriage may be nothing more than a manacle.

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Carlo Matos has published five books: A School for Fishermen (BrickHouse), Counting Sheep Till Doomsday and Big Bad Asterisk* (BlazeVox), Ibsen’s Foreign Contagion (Academica), and The Secret Correspondence of Loon and Fiasco (forthcoming Mayapple). He has also published in many journals like Menacing Hedge, HTML Giant, Cleaver Magazine, and The Rumpus. He blogs at carlomatos.blogspot.com.