Books by Kristina Marie Darling

Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Womens Poetry examines representations of philosophical discourses in Modernist womens 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.

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.

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