About the Author\nKristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-six books. Her work has been recognized with awards from Yaddo, the American Academy in Rome, Foundación Valparaíso, the Heinz Foundation, Cité Internationale in Paris, and the Whiting Foundation. She divides her time between the United States and Europe.\nCarol Guess is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including Doll Studies: Forensics and Tinderbox Lawn. She is Professor of English at Western Washington University, where she teaches Queer Studies and Creative Writing. She Lives in Seattle.\n“While marriage may be taking no prisoners in this collection, it’s clear that the union of Darling and Guess was a perfect one. They produced a stunning, vivid, and emotionally visceral feminist rumination. They take tremendous formal risks in the construction of this book, and all those risks carry major, hard earned truths.” – Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing 
"In X Marks the Dress, Guess & Darling weave a narrative of love and identity that unpacks itself again and again. Like beautifully wrought Matryoshka dolls, these poems explore the depth and wonder of language as well as its inability to truly define any one thing. Lines and images reappear in new and surprising ways―footnotes, appendices, definitions―that stunningly illustrate exactly how slippery love can be." 
―Erin Elizabeth Smith, author of The Naming of Strays

X Marks the Dress: A Registry

Guess, Carol

Darling, Kristina Marie

Reference

Persea

Poetry. Women's Studies. "In X MARKS THE DRESS, Darling &amp; Guess weave a narrative of love and identity that unpacks itself again and again. Like beautifully wrought Matryoshka dolls, these poems explore the depth and wonder of language as well as its inability to truly define any one thing. Lines and images reappear in new and surprising ways—footnotes, appendices, definitions—that stunningly illustrate exactly how slippery love can be."—Erin Elizabeth Smith "X MARKS THE DRESS: A REGISTRY by Kristina Marie Darling &amp; Carol Guess presents the scintillating variables of time and its complex philosophical relationship with experiential space. These poems spark an incandescent fire of imagination in an enormous tonal range. Positioned on both sides of the mirror at once, watching reflections of ever-changing backgrounds of relationships and marriage. Like dreaming about having a dream this book cajole, beckon and posit in transcendent, expressive, and provocative words. Ultimately, the words never fill the void. Instead, they take us deeper and deeper down to a dark and disorienting place that continually excites the reader with its possibilities. This is an excellent work from two wonderful poets."—Geoffrey Gatza "In Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess's collaborative book, X MARKS THE DRESS: A REGISTRY, the reader receives a delicious catalog of wants. The cohabitation of idealized domestic bliss and the wild and unwilling spirit of individuality split the difference. The newlyweds divide the baby in half. The unspoken gets footnoted. The remnants get erased and placed in the appendices. In glorious sequences of riffs, flirtations, recombinations, and dances, Darling and Guess's collaboration intoxicates. Though the wedding china may get smashed against the trees, and though the stiletto heels may get broken, the moments in these lyrical vignettes will be long enshrined "on a red satin pillow."—Oliver de la Paz "These poems are arch, eyeing the cake. They undo us as we enter their rooms, our lace caught on the door knob, our mouths dripping generations of nameless desire. Each poem is a strand that keeps us tied to the marriage ritual, yet the reader is left diced up and served, simmered in pink, skeptical of the heart yet wanting to eat another's. 'I love you more because I love you both' is the song we dance to, the cadence that questions what a bond is, and between whom, and whether it is possible to love at all (when love is a mirror in a room of mirrors)."—Emily Kendal Frey

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Gold Wake Press

"""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

Requited

BlazeVOX Books

In Kristina Marie Darling's novel, Frances the Mute, a weirdly-domestic romance between Frances and Darcy unfolds somewhere in the land of undead, maybe dead. It unfolds, or rather circles, in the odd details of clothing, in the oddly empty language of the romance novel's diamond rings and "all that dark red hair tumbling from her shoulders." Darling goes back, back, back at that language, back at those tired symbols of "love" to get at something. The result is unsettling, is clattering in an absurd emptiness that is full of junk romance, and it always remains somehow tender. "Darcy had tried marriage, music, and suicide, and he was left with an unworn dress, his stuttering bride."  —Sarah Vap   Frances the Mute / The Bright Continent is a love story shaped by the language of absence—and haunted by the absence of language. In Kristina Marie Darling’s hands, the “small ornaments” of the quotidian are invested with a radiant significance rustling beneath the surface of words. Only by traversing silence do we “sing perfectly,” she reminds us, as if recalling and revising Keats’s famously voiceless lovers from his Grecian urn. For Keats, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” For Darling, the sweetest music is that which is rife with the uncanny.  —Tony Trigilio

Frances the Mute / The Bright Continent (A Diptych)

Poetry. "When Henry David Thoreau wrote "The stars are the apexes to what triangles," I'm not so sure he had poetry collaborations in mind. And yet, when Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher say&mdash;though which one says it, or both, or none, I don't know&mdash;"Soon we wonder why we're both thinking about astronomy, and at exactly the same time," I begin to see by a sidereal light that collaboration at its best may be no more than two poets far apart gazing up at the same star's height, and what fills the triangle is the poem, otherwise known as art. These poems of "shared consciousness" make of individual life a jointly lived thing, so much so, that "we" hides in every "I" and "you." These collaborative poems gather us into their intimate community, and once within these pages, we glimpse what poetry might long have tried to teach us: how it is we go about learning to think, learning to see, learning to feel together."&mdash;Dan Beachy- Quick "One measure of the potency of literature is that its strangeness forces the reader to change her world to incorporate it, or to leave her world and join the one the writer has created. In this case, Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher's extraordinary domestic noir, GHOST / LANDSCAPE, creates both responses in me: transformation and relocation. Part of this book's wonderful strangeness, of course, arises from the nature of the collaboration between Darling and Gallaher, as their voices transform and relocate, blend and electrify into a single speaker (I, you, we) that longs for conversation: "I tried to phone you, but the snow went on for miles." This ache for articulation, for communion, is further complicated by the middle-class American ennui, dark humor, and matter-of-fact violence of the book. I finished GHOST / LANDSCAPE with the certainty that I have at least two voices, and one murder, inside me. This book will stay with me for a very long time."&mdash;Allison Benis White "Too often coauthored poetry books feel more like exercises than true, vital collections. Not so with Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher's GHOST / LANDSCAPE. These startling poems push against the boundaries of daily living through sustained attention and quiet articulation. "I'm busy looking at everything I'm looking at," Darling and Gallaher assert in one poem; in another they say of the suburban landscape in which many of these poems are set, "We can lift it up from the edges and look underneath. It's like looking into a mirror." Often the worlds of these poems feel dreamlike, populated at the perimeter with the ghosts of past and present as we eavesdrop on the only living voices merging, ultimately, into one human voice. And though the poems can be playful and self- reflexive&mdash;as one would expect from these two terrific postmodern poets&mdash;ultimately this is an intimate and surprisingly unified book of big ideas: "We all think we're having different lives, when really there's only one life and we're sharing it."&mdash;Wayne Miller "GHOST / LANDSCAPE reads like an intimate chat, except not the kind people have over tea. Maybe it's whiskey causing these emotional flare-ups ("They warned me about you"), these bouts of nostalgia ("You wake wondering where the antique chickens are"), these lamentations about lost love (count the number of missed phone calls throughout), these discomfiting confessions ("...I had always thought unhappiness would be easy"). The chemistry between these poets is electric; it lights up the page."&mdash;Diana Spechler

Ghost / Landscape

Gallaher, John

Daylight Has Already Come

Black Lawrence Press

The essays in the collection examine, from a variety of perspectives and conceptual standpoints, the ways performative language in contemporary poetry can be politically charged.&#8239;The poetic text, then, becomes a spectacle, which ultimately renegotiates the power dynamics implicit&#8239;in the simple act of looking.&#8239;As the language unfolds before the reader, they are involved and implicated in a revision of what is and what always has been an unequal share of power on the stage of textual authorship and readerly interpretation.&#8239;In&#8239;Look to Your Left:&#8239;A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle, Darling grounds these ambitious theoretical discussions (and interventions) in poetry by women, non-binary writers, and writers of color, with a particular emphasis on texts that have been heretofore undertheorized.

Look To Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

University Of Akron Press

Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women's Poetry examines representations of philosophical discourses in Modernist women's writing. Philosophers argued in the early twentieth century for an understanding of the self as both corporeal and relational, shaped and reshaped by interactions within a community. The once clear distinction between self and other was increasingly called into question. This breakdown of boundaries between self and world often manifested in the style of early twentieth-century literary works. Modernist poetry, like stream of consciousness fiction, used metaphor, sound, and a revision of received grammatical structures to blur the boundaries between the individual and collective. This book explores the ways that feminist writers like Mina Loy, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore used style and technique to respond to these philosophical debates, reclaiming agency over a predominantly male philosophical discourse. While many critics have addressed the thematic content of these writers' work, few scholars have taken up this question while focusing on the style of the writing. This book shows how these feminist poets used seemingly small stylistic choices in poetry to make necessary contributions to contemporary philosophical discourses, ultimately rendering these philosophical conversations more inclusive.

Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women's Poetry: An Imagist Turned Philosopher

History & Criticism

Lexington Books

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. JE SUIS L'AUTRE: ESSAYS AND INTERROGATIONS, is a collection of lyric criticism that speaks to a rapidly changing literary landscape, with elements of personal narrative, craft analysis, and cultural commentary. By offering a hybrid approach to scholarly writing, Darling's prose establishes a poetic sensibility as it examines a wide range of recent experimental and collaborative works of literature. The diverse texts discussed in this essay collection include Julie Marie Wade's Wishbone, Sarah Manguso's The Guardians, G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher's Your Father On The Train Of Ghosts, Anne Boyer's GARMENTS AGAINST WOMEN, Suzanne Scanlon's HER 37TH YEAR: AN INDEX, and many others. Throughout Darling's book, recent works of literature offer a point of entry to more ambitious questions about voice, affect, and conscious experience.

Je Suis L'Autre: Essays & Interrogations

Essays & Correspondence

C&R Press

Poetry. "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

Dark Horse

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Darling, Kristina Marie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Darling, Kristina Marie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Darling, Kristina Marie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

X Marks the Dress: A Registry

X Marks the Dress: A Registry

Requited

Frances the Mute / The Bright Continent (A Diptych)

Ghost / Landscape

Daylight Has Already Come

Look To Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics)

Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women's Poetry: An Imagist Turned Philosopher

Je Suis L'Autre: Essays & Interrogations

Dark Horse