Night Songs builds within its pages an atmosphere Proustian-no, not sentences running the course of many pages; no, not any simply measured loquaciousness. Rather, we find here a poetry concerned with music, subsuming into itself music's own mysterious structure: sentence as re-appearing theme, a music-like stitch that counters the discursive pleasures of the prose poems by calling the reader's mind back to what must be, or might be, remembered. Here, too, the night thickens with nostalgia, a form of memory that calls into question itself, revises itself, erases itself, categorizes itself-a music, I'd say, that wants to listen to itself to know its own song, to prove its melody to itself with only itself for evidence. It is a lovingly faulty task undertaken in poems just as lovingly full, lovingly faultless, trusting to the book's whole composition what no single poem can claim alone-the music entire. -Dan Beachy-Quick The mostly prose poems of Night Songs provide us with a poetry of subtle gestures that plays with the borders of reader/listener and creator/producer, that tangles with questions of order/mechanization versus life/subject. Through her use of music as a theme, Darling takes us on an exploration of poetics in brief but well-crafted pieces. -William Allegrezza Night Songs is a strange and marvelous collection. In a series of off-kilter narratives, Kristina Marie Darling describes the shifting interior lives of musicians, deconstructs a Victorian guide to music appreciation, then, word by word, erases her own poems. Here, the evening opens "like a black umbrella" while the audience murmurs. Later, a cellist practices as snow falls around him "like tinfoil under a phosphorescent moon." Musicians compete, fail, strive or fall in love-until the dim stage collapses "in a heap of shattered harpsichords." Lyrically subtle and technically inventive, these poems play with narrative and prose forms in ways I haven't encountered before. And they're deeply engaging. -Kevin Prufer

Night Songs

Kristina Marie Darling

Gold Wake Press

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

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

History

Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic

Poetry. Edited by Jeffrey Levine and Kristina Marie Darling. In this timely anthology, established and emerging poets bear powerful witness to the COVID-19 pandemic in writing that reels from collective grief and uncertainty. This volume consists of sixteen separate chapbooks, and a collection of pandemic-era photography, which are unified by a shared narrative: public and private experiences of quarantine, and the impulse toward creation during a time of enormous upheaval, injustice, and protest. Each voice brings with it a deeply personal account of this globally historic moment, and in doing so, conveys the urgency of introspection, of isolation, and of revolution. These pieces feature B. A. Van Sise, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Yusef Komunyakaa, Laren McClung, Stephanie Strickland, Mary Jo Bang, Shane McCrae, Ken Chen, J. Mae Barizo, Dora Malech, Jon Davis, Lee Young-Ju, Jae Kim, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, A. Van Jordan, Maggie Queeney, Traci Brimhall, Brynn Saito, Denise Duhamel, and Rick Barot. This is a transcendent and ultimately transformative book of poetry written through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Literature & Fiction

Jeffrey Levine

Poetry

Tupelo Press

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Books by Kristina Marie Darling