Spanning four books across a six year period, Darling's selected delivers a natural cohesion, a sense of the single, complex gesture, sharply whittled from these formerly separate visions. In the opening poem, Darling writes, "when she falls in love/ physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it," posing a thesis statement for the poems' skeletal, clawing elegance. At the center of this book is a failed engagement, a sudden abandonment, tinged with violence, which serves as Darling's flood subject, and expressed most often though erasures and extended narratives centered on playwriting and theatrical performance. Specifically, Shakespeare's Ophelia appears as a wire running through the poems, serving as a totem for the speaker's despair and aesthetic concerns. Those who have followed Darling's astonishing artistic output will be delighted to possess this selection of her strongest and most current work. -Allison Benis White
Truest intimacy comes with an awful paradox: How can what is closest to us also be what is furthest away? An uncanny familiarity binds together these poems selected from the volumes Kristina Darling has written, so much so, it can feel as if each poem is trying to make the same gesture, to show us something-some scene, some relic, some person, some story, some confession-that retreats into obscurity as soon as a portion is revealed. Motifs surface and resurface again, nodes of a bare nerve: a silken dress, a bouquet of flowers, a seascape, a you, a her, a window, a text, a room. The great virtue here is a poetry that makes of itself an inner chamber, a place aside from the grand narratives-be they Shakespeare's tragedies, or a text of which we have but the footnotes-that give ground to thoughts so quiet we seldom hear them even within ourselves. It is an old word, but an apt one, that describes these pages: they are lovelorn. That is, they suffer the thing they seek; and they offer us steadfast company as we do the very same. -Dan Beachy-Quick
The remarkably prolific Kristina Marie Darling presents selected poems covering only 6 years, but many styles. Intensely literary, and visually beautiful as well, these poems in the form of footnotes, erasures, lyric essays, and meditations on other texts, show the full array of her interests and literary powers. She has the ability to create haunting and intimate physical spaces with her language a
Spanning four books across a six year period, Darling's<