The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters and Fragments

In the fine mesh of these poems Kristina Maria Darling recovers from H.D.'s correspondence a dream city suffused with Eros and a chilly nostalgia. Here delicate, archetypical image making is counter-pointed by the wry convolutions of her footnotes and appendices. Definitions dilate into images, memory, hieroglyphs moving us deeper into the vascular corridors of a mystical sub consciousness. Eat this lotus and do not worry about going home. -JOE HALL, author of Pigafetta is My Wife /Virtually no found form goes unfound in Kristina Marie Darling's The Body is a Little Gilded Cage. Footnotes and appendices, letters and lists, definitions and glossaries compound architecturally into a devastatingly well-dressed, fin-de-siècle whole. Bedecked in feathers, bones, buttons and flowers, Darling's fragments coruscate and clink together, catching the light, catching your eye like the most decadent chandelier, illuminating your way through "the arcades of a cathedral" and showing you "maps of the hidden rooms" where you might find the ghost of Hilda Doolittle under "a cold, white moon." -KATHLEEN ROONEY, author of Oneiromance (an epithalamion) / Might I make a suggestion to the reader finding his or her way to Kristina Marie Darling's The Body Is a Gilded Cage? Imagine the subjective experience of a chandelier. And not just because of the chandelier's resemblance to a cage, and not just because a chandelier is, at its heart, a collection of fragments, but because of the very intricately beveled edge multiplying throughout. Imagine the chandelier observing reality, and you will understand how to read Darling's book of poems. -KENT SHAW, author of Calenture / Told in footnotes, glossaries, and mysterious, incomplete letters, The Body is A Little Gilded Cage transcends and expands traditional narrative with delightful results. Both sensual and sinister, it's a story concealed in the deep folds of velvet curtains, revealed a little bit more with each spin of dancers, each turn of the antique phonograph. -KRISTY BOWEN, author The Fever Almanac