Women and Ghosts by Kristina Marie Darling

Why is there so much language, so many words I didn’t want.” Darling’s collection interrogates a legacy of literary women that haunt our subconscious through paralleling a female narrator’s mental strife alongside Shakespeare’s tragic women: Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, Cleopatra, and more. Darling follows the trails of blood left on the page to explore violence done to women, both emotionally and physically. Through Darling’s innovative forms, she’s able to render the classical refreshingly new and chillingly devastating. Her writing, however, hits a more sensitive nerve: the terror of gendered violence and the chafing of powerlessness in womanhood, as her characters “cleave under the weight of my own dress.” Yet, power is embedded in Darling’s words, sharp and cutting as a razor blade: this is a collection all women should read.

—Anne Champion, author of Reluctant Mistress and The Dark Length Home

Women and Ghosts is a book for the brokenhearted: “Iced over with sadness,” its speaker says (or doesn’t), “I can no longer speak.” In ghost text stricken from the record, she also says (or doesn’t): “I wonder how someone else’s life can seem so much my own.” She means Desdemona’s. Ophelia’s. Juliet’s. Cleopatra’s. Lavinia’s. But when I read these words, I think: not theirs, hers — I wonder how her life can seem so much my own. I love this book. I honor it. I cherish it. I lose myself in its tragedies, in the absences and silences of women’s lives and I feel less desperate, less anxious, less alone.

—Molly Gaudry, author of We Take Me Apart and Desire: A Haunting

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over twenty collections of poetry and hybrid prose, which include VOW, PETRARCHAN, and FAILURE LYRIC, forthcoming from BlazeVOX Books. Her writing has been described by literary critics as “haunting,” “mesmerizing,” and “complex.” Poet and Kenyon Review editor Zach Savich writes that her body of work is a “singularly graceful and stunningly incisive exploration of poetic insight, vision, and transformation.” Donald Revell writes of her SELECTED POEMS, “Here is a new tradition, alive in bright air.” Kristina’s books have also been reviewed widely in literary magazines, including The Boston Review, Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, Rain Taxi, The Mid-American Review, Pleiades, and The Southern Humanities Review.

Within the past few years, her writing has been honored with a Yaddo residency, a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, and a Visiting Artist Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. She has also held artist-in-residence fellowships at the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Ragdale Foundation, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and numerous other institutions. Kristina is the recipient of international literary arts fellowships from Le Moulin à Nef (VCCA France), the Tenòt Foundation (France), the B.A.U. Institute (Italy), and 360 Xochi Quetzal (Mexico), as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation Archive Center. Her work has also been recognized with the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets and nominations for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award.

Kristina is active as a literary critic, with reviews and essays appearing in such magazines as The Gettysburg Review, The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, and New Letters. Her critical projects have been supported by grants from the University of Missouri and the University at Buffalo, as well as a Riverrun Foundation Research Fellowship to complete archival work at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Kristina holds degrees in English Literature and American Culture Studies from Washington University, as well as an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Missouri. She is currently working toward both an M.F.A. at New York University and a Ph.D. in Poetics at S.U.N.Y.-Buffalo, where she was awarded a Presidential Fellowship.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 74 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-219-8

$16

Women and Ghosts by Kristin… by Geoffrey Gatza