Kristina Marie Darling

[REVIEW] Fortress by Kristina Marie Darling

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review for 16 June FORTRESS - sheila.squillante@gmail.com - Gmail - Mozilla Firefox 6152015 112144 AM

Sundress Publications

78 pages, $14.00

 

Review by Carley Moore

 

Marriage, it turns out, is a kind of fortress. Or maybe marriage just calls us to homes—some of us will wind up in cabins, others apartments, and still others McMansions. Regardless of whether or not we can afford the down payment, the mortgage, or the rent, the ideology around marriage and housing runs deep in America. How else to explain why so many of us went belly up in 2008 so that we could have a chance at owning our little piece of the American dream? And why do we continue to get married when the divorce rate is well over thirty percent?

Kristina Marie Darling’s newest collection of poetry, Fortress, is a spare examination on the ruins of a marriage and the pain of that loss. The book’s shape calls to mind a box, square rather than the traditional rectangle, and aside from the preface and the epilogue which are erasures of Elaine Scarry’s classic work The Body in Pain—the poems inhabit the bottom of each page in the form of either footnotes or spare lines of prose. The remainder of the page is blank white space, a field onto which we can project our responses. The layout of these pages reminded me of the story templates my daughter’s first grade teacher gives her students; lines at the bottom and a vast white space for drawing. Part of this book’s beauty lies in Darling’s commitment to the white space, to the meadow, garden, and flowerboxes in which the speaker and her husband grow poppies, lilies, and geraniums. This landscape is contested, the meadow is burned, the poppies die, and the husband tears out primroses so that he can begin “tending the garden himself, with all of the grace of a landscape painter.” The book makes references to Persephone, romantic poets like Keats, and opium traffics in a dreamy-drug induced haze, and I couldn’t help but think of those early mythological marriages (Leda and Europa) in which the proposal is nothing more than a rape. The speaker seems just as baffled by her marriage, and she wanders the fortress of her house and its grounds picking up the objects from her trousseau as if on a hunt for clues as to who she was before she became a wife. In my favorite poem of the book, the speaker asks, “What is there left to say? When we married, I became his wife. I can no longer remember what I looked like before that veil descended, or the vow exchanged between us.” This poem, like many others in Darling’s book, suggests that the pain of a ruined marriage is a surprise and in some ways, like Scarry’s premise, beyond language. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Music for another life, by Kristina Marie Darling and Max Avi Kaplan

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music

BlazeVOX Books
77 pages, $18.00

Review by Anne Champion

Kristina Marie Darling, already an accomplished poet in her own right (she’s published sixteen poetry collections), has begun paving a new trail with her foray into collaborative writing. Her previous collaborations work alongside poet Carol Guess, but her newest work, Music for another life, collaborates with the accomplished visual artist and scholar, Max Avi Kaplan, and the finished product is a brilliant and moving piece of art. The cover, featuring a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like donned in Jacqueline Kennedy inspired attire, chillingly depicts a woman laying in grass in a corpse pose, and this image foreshadows what’s to come: stunning, delicate beauty that adheres to societal standards juxtaposed with hauntingly devastating realities.

The narrative, composed solely of short prose poems, follows a speaker named Adelle as she traverses her lavish landscape in heels, swanky sunglasses, and pencil skirts. Each page features a different picture of Adelle—either standing outside of her domestic sphere or lounging in nature. The work of light and shadow in these photographs speaks volumes to the Adelle’s search for self and inability to find it, either from being blinded, outshined, or blurred into unrecognizablity. Some of the poses only vary slightly, so you can flip through the pictures quickly and watch Adelle move as if she were an animation. Regardless of the various ways you can look at and interpret the images, the most important thing they do is immerse the reader in a very real and detailed world: paired with the poetry, it’s hard not to empathize with the character while also feeling as trapped and suffocated as she does, despite the fact that she clearly frolics in an upper class status. Maybe even because of it. Continue reading →

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

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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] Petrarchan, by Kristina Marie Darling

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~by C.L. Bledsoe

 

Petrarchan

 

BlazeVOX [books]

72 pgs./$16

 

Darling has produced a collection of footnotes, commentaries, and poem fragments inspired by the work of Francesco Petrarcha, a poet who was known for writing emotional but spare poems. Darling has deconstructed his work to the barest slivers of emotional resonance and then shared her reactions. This is a book about a book, a direct response. But in producing these reactions, Darling is also showing us something of herself. Her reactions don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re influenced by elements of her life, so we also see a bit of Darling behind the curtains.

The book opens with a quote from Petrarcha, “And tears are heard within the harp I touch.” Harps are considered one of the more emotive instruments, and Patrarcha’s personification of the instrument implies that he shares his own sadness or loss through the harp he touches, or possibly plays; his emotion is shared through his art. “Harp” also sounds a lot like “heart” which implies that Petrarcha produces sadness in his audience, that their loss echoes his own, which connects him and his audience. This is apropos since Darling is, herself, mirroring Petrarcha’s tears, at times, through her own “harp.” Continue reading →

Melancholia (an Essay) by Kristina Marie Darling (A Review by Gina Myers)

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Ravenna Press

$10

Melancholia, Kristina Marie Darling’s new collection, is referred to as an “essay,” but instead of finding a traditional essay inside the covers of this tiny book (part of Ravenna Press’s Pocket Series), the reader encounters an example of the verb form of the word: to attempt or try. The book is composed of apostrophes, definitions, footnotes, and glossaries. Through these series of fragments, Darling attempts to relay the story of a courtship and what is left after it is over.

The book opens with an epigraph from Emma Bolden’s The Sad Epistles: “If only I if only. / This is not simple to say.” This seems to work as a guiding principle of the work to follow: it is not simple to say, and, therefore, it will come out in small fragments, rendering the story incomplete. After a brief apostrophe addressed to “Dearest,” Darling provides a seven part definition for “noctuary” that includes keeping a record of what passes in the night, an idea of waking from a dream to begin a series of portraits, and several more ideas that involve either close examination or deep introspection/self-awareness, until, finally, she ends with, “To select and omit, as a poet would.” And so the story that follows is a noctuary: the details have been carefully selected and much has been omitted, and there is something dreamlike about it all, as if these fleeting memories are details remembered upon waking.

The story that is told revolves around objects: lockets and buttons, earrings and cufflinks. There is something antiquated about the story–the setting more Victorian with its fields and country estates, its red velvet pillows, courtship rituals, and the heroine’s delicate white skin and silk dresses. Whether or not the story is a dream is unclear, as Darling writes in “Noctuary (III)”:

“The dream gave rise to a lapse in the accuracy of her meticulous ledger. A velvet ribbon nestled among its luminous white pages.” Continue reading →

The Moon and Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell By Kristina Marie Darling (A Review by Anne Champion)

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BlazeVOX

66 pages/ $12

If you are familiar with the work of Kristina Marie Darling, it should come as no surprise that she chooses Joseph Cornell as her muse for her newest collection recently released from BlazeVOX books. Cornell, an artist and sculptor, was revered for his work in assemblage, creating simple boxes fronted with glass planes that were filled with found objects. It has been noted that Cornell could create poetry from the commonplace, and he was inspired by precious objects of nostalgia and beauty. In this sense, Cornell is Darling’s other, as her fragmented poems of footnotes and definitions have been capturing nostalgic Victorian surreal dreamscapes for years. Opening a collection of Darling’s work is like opening a jewelry box of lustrous knick knacks and valuable antiques. Continue reading →

The Body is a Little Gilded Cage by Kristina Marie Darling (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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In short: Kristina Marie Darling’s The Body is a Little Gilded Cage is the best book that Darling has written and the best book that Gold Wake Press has produced. I’ve read Darling’s previous Night Songs (also from Gold Wake Press) and Compendium (from Cow Heavy Books) and while both are good, this new book is the strongest of Darling’s work by far. And in terms of Gold Wake Press, the production quality of this particular title is much higher than their previous titles, the design cleaner, the cover art more refined, and the layout nicely punchy, a book beautiful to hold in every way.

from ‘Soirée (III)’:

The music begins & we watch dancers stumble beneath dim chandeliers. Their faces blur in every mirror & I imagine us adrift among the hall’s towering white pillars. My heart a room opening inside a darkened room. Now each balustrade glitters with empty crystal & the guests can only murmur. The phonograph keeps turning & soon the night is a pearl necklace I’ve locked away with a silver key–

One of the best elements of The Body is a Little Gilded Cage is Darling’s understanding and use of through-line. The narrative is that of a garden party coupling, but told from a variety of poetic perspectives in time and space, enormous close-ups of corsages and chandeliers mixed with sweeping pans across the garden, the dancing bodies, our heated couple buried within or skirting the edges.

The Body is a Little Gilded Cage also very effectively uses diversity of modes, beginning with tightly woven prose poems, moving into footnotes for unwritten texts, definitions of phrases and words within the collection, and closing with a stint of fantastically fragmented letters.

from ‘A History of the Phonograph: Glossary of Terms’:

emboss. To impress upon, usually with the intent of preserving. Between movements the phonograph seemed to turn more slowly, heavy with the wilted corsages of last season

from ‘Appendix B: Correspondence’:

Dearest,

You were like

bits of broken glass-pictures in a cathedral

night & some Greek island

this is not much of a letter

And while this variety of approaches in a single poetic collection is not new for Darling, Compendium functioned in much the same way, the ease and clarity of the through-line here is deftly rendered and shows us the best of what Kristina Marie Darling has to offer. The only question we are left with in The Body is a Little Gilded Cage is what would happen to Darling’s writing if she didn’t use footnotes or mock-historical documents, what if she wrote a collection that didn’t diversify its approach throughout? I’m excited to see the answer to those questions somewhere down Darling’s writerly trajectory, but in the meantime, she has given us her best work here, perfectly pinned in a beautiful Gold Wake Press skin.

The Body is a Little Gilded Cage is available from Gold Wake Press.

J. A. Tyler is the author of three novels: Inconceivable Wilson, A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed, and A Shiny, Unused Heart. He is also founding editor of Mud Luscious Press.