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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

Fantastic and magical reminiscence

What motivates writers to create purposefully difficult texts? In what ways is textual difficulty politically charged? In this collection of smart and accessible essays, Kristina Marie Darling seeks to answer these questions by delving deeply into the idea of difficulty in contemporary women's poetry. Through close engagement with recent poetry and hybrid work from women, non-binary writers, and writers of color, Darling argues that textual difficulty constitutes a provocative reversal of power, in which writers from historically marginalized groups within society can decide who is allowed into the imaginative terrain they have created. In constructing this argument, she shows the full range and artistic possibilities inherent in contemporary texts that foreground textual difficulty as an aesthetic gesture. This is powerful reading that will change how you think about contemporary poetry and its subversive possibilities.

A hybrid of poetry, flash essay, and photography, THE DISAPPOINTMENT ACTS charts the limits of what grief can be expressed in language.

"""Where would I travel if you hadn't stopped me on the bridge to a brighter city,"" asks the narrator of Requited, Kristina Marie Darling's brilliant new essay-in-fragments. These spare, elegant prose poems describe a love affair salted like the ""marble façade"" of its frozen freeways. Lush flowers brittle into ""iced-over fields of dead poppies"" where ""plaster doves have cracked from the cold."" Each poem poses a question meant to haunt the reader, much as Darling's mysterious narrator is haunted by miscommunication: ""There are always so many things that can go wrong in a conversation."" This gorgeous collection evokes passionate emotion through precise imagery and startling detail: ""You are the display of lights. / & now cold water, / its bitter taste.""--Carol Guess, author of Tinderbox Lawn and Doll Studies: Forensics"Why," Kristina Marie Darling asks, or, more exactly, doesn't ask but states in the form of questions in her star dusted book of meteorites, "Why can so many things be mistaken for metaphors." Metaphors, meteorites, these are the last telegrams of nano "narrative." Distilled fragments, de-can't-ed, that are then fermented again in the redacted and deduced subliminal "Epilogue. These are subatomic automatons, little engines that should. They are like, well, liking. They are like nothing else. And I like liking all this liking. --Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter

This book analyzes the relationship between silence, formal innovation, and social justice in recent poetry by women, non-binary writers, and writers of color. Silence in poetry has been heretofore undertheorized, as most books that engage this topic are scholarly monographs focused on a single writer's work, such as Therese Lentfoer's Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Merton and Jean Franco's Cesar Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence, both of which are, at this point, a bit dated. Kazim Ali's Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art, and the Architecture of Silence may very well be the only recent study of silence and poetry, and does not foreground stylistically innovative work. These scholars clearly recognize that silence offers invaluable insight into the possibilities for a reader's imaginative work within a given text. After all, it is the space between things that makes room for the reader's imagination, and allows room for the other to speak. However, a broader survey of silence in innovative contemporary and historical poetry will offer insight into the full range of approaches to the work that silence can do in poetry. This book engages examples ranging from dramatic verse to lyric fragments and prose poetry. Given these poets' commitment to social justice, the readerly possibility in these texts' gaps and elisions is rife with real-world implications, as the reader's imaginative work in these texts almost always extends beyond the realm of language, literature, and the arts.

"In poems lit by an incendiary marriage, Kristina Marie Darling traces a story that begins, as stories often do, "as a small mark on the horizon." Brave and haunted, these poems burn down to ash and winter, daring to unlock the spell of memory's silver flashings. The small remains, like distant stars, make a moving portrait.--Mary Ann Samyn, author of My Life in Heaven"By then I could barely speak," Kristina Marie Darling writes, in a collection that mirrors the dissolution of a relationship: mythologizing, erasing, reinventing, and, finally, reinvestigating itself. The Sun & the Moon is rooted in the liminal, where the ghosts that populate these poems become more human than the couple whose house they inhabit, whose drawers they open, whose clothes they wear. Everything is simultaneously burning and freezing, brightening and dimming, so that the stagnancy of a relationship becomes eerily unsettling--claustrophobic and violent--a place for knives and locks and ash. "It's the strangest things that keep me from leaving." It's the same devastatingly strange things that will make readers stay.--Corey Van Landingham, author of Antidote"From what I understood, the ghosts had always been volatile." Kristina Marie Darling's The Sun & the Moon is a homage to the mutability of consciousness and memory. These prose-poems and erasures achieve a kind of Victorian noir by turning the cluttered, dangerous spaces of desire and mourning into irreducible images. Smudged with ash, soot and dark red stars, The Sun & the Moon renders a universe of jagged, dazzling relics that haunt and captivate us long after the book is finished."--Kara Candito, author of Spectator and Taste of Cherry