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 →