Bücher von Kristina Marie Darling

The essays in this collection use a wide range of contemporary experimental texts as a point of entry to a single question: Is there a uniquely female variety of sorrow? This book does not provide a clean answer, but rather, an ongoing effort to refine the question. These essays ask what it means to be other, what it means to be othered by and through language, what it means to be captive to grammar and its implicit logic, and what being captive in this way does to an inner life and a psyche, what is knowable (and what cannot be articulated) in an inner life and that is restricted by the artificial order of the sentence, and whether it is possible to think or feel what exists at the very periphery of grammar. After all, there is always sadness in knowing what lies just beyond our reach.

Meet Jane Dark-both the everywoman and the uberwoman-who tries "to ache more beautifully" as she suffers the indignities of a husband's infidelity and the "other wife." In a series of stunning prose poems entitled "Sad Film," Kristina Marie Darling sublimely describes the strains of a relationship without "even a cough to break the silence." This inventive writer re-imagines the cultural scripts of heartache and the relationship imperative white honoring the pain and chaos of betrayal as well as the violence for which we are capable. DARK HORSE is a masterful pastiche, repeating phraseology transforming and deepening its meaning from poem to poem. -Denise Duhamel

Kristina Marie Darling's Correspondence is a miniaturist's miniature, a seeming erasure leaving behind only subplots and footnotes and glossaries, secondary definitions nested beneath more primary meanings, salutations but not letters: Because perhaps where there is loss it is what remains after the story is told that is most beautiful, or else what proceeds it; not how we were together, but how we say hello, how we say goodbye. -Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found