An Interview with John Reed, author of A Drama in Time: The New School Century

Kristina Marie Darling: Your newest book, A Drama in TIme: The New School Century, just launched from Profile Books Ltd. What are three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

John Reed: Well, I'd like people to know about The New School and its history, and coming to the book with a very basic outline of The New School is something I'd hope for. There's nothing like writing a book about a submarine and having someone ask you, "but what's a submarine?"

I'd also love for people to know that it's a reference book, with many pictures, and that it was designed to read through or to just peck at, reading now and then and going back to for information. That would make me really happy, knowing the book lived that kind of life on people's shelves.

The last thing, hmm. I'd love for people to know that there are many mysteries to solve here. 

KMD: In addition to your achievements in nonfiction, you are an accomplished poet and novelist. Why is it important for writers to allow themselves to move fluidly between genres? What can nonfiction writers learn from poets? And from their colleagues working in fiction? 

JR: When I was in graduate school in the 90s, this idea of writing across genres was actively discouraged. It may still be discouraged at some schools. I was often challenged: what are you? Would I be writing cultural criticism, non-fiction, poetry, fiction? My first novel was historical fiction, which seemed at the time the only way to marry a fictive sensibility with an historical one. Now, many of those distinctions have gone away, which is as it should be. This is partly, I expect, a result of the use of fiction techniques in non-fiction, and vice versa. And this isn't only in the literary space, but in the media space. Reality television, the internet, etc etc, all this is old hat now. We understand that narrative design is a skill apart from the writing itself. It seems to me, and I'm sure people would disagree with me here, that there are really only two forms of text, prose and poetry, and that even those two aren't that different. If you can write a line of poetry, and you understand to limit your metaphorical values and employ extended metaphors rather than multiple metaphors, you can write a line in any form: film, television, advertising, essay, journalism, anything. And the great lessons of prose—narrative structure, tense, interiority and POV—will take you into any textual terrain, line to line, scene to scene, paragraph to paragraph.

KMD:  Relatedly, How did your cross-genre sensibility equip you for the rewards and challenges of writing A Drama in Time: The New School Century?

JR: The problem of a centennial book about The New School was a sophisticated one: how could I make it a single compelling story? The fear was that it would be: a giant block of prose that was dry as dust; a nearly as boring timeline; a seemingly random series of callouts. The solution was to layer an epic structure onto a journey structure: there are many individuals and points of the story, but the story as a whole is a characterization of The New School. That's what justifies the non-chronological telling. I wanted to put the internal experience of the school before the external experience of the school. I was quite pleased with the solution; it came to me as an aha revelation.

KMD: In addition to documenting the New School’s history, you also teach in the MFA in writing program there. What has teaching opened up for you as you embarked on this project?

JR: The project has been extraordinarily humbling. I've had the chance to research—not nearly enough but still I'm grateful—the lives and visions of an amazing cohort of artists, writers, creatives and thinkers. There's so much more to do; I can only hope I'll keep finding ways to go back to this history. As faculty, I'm humbled and honored to work with the New School artists, writers, creatives and thinkers of today—all of the community that upholds the New School tradition. The people at The New School impress me every day. Everyone. 

KMD: As you promote A Drama in Time, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?

JR: I'd love to work on some narrative design seminars: look at narrative structure as it's utilized across media and throughout culture. I do things like that in my teaching at The New School but I enjoy the more open forums sometimes.  

KMD: What’s next? What are you currently working on? 

JR: I'm finishing up a long term historical novel project: very much in keeping with my first novel. Civil War, a bit of romance, history and sadness. I've also been working on a quick novel project, through this COVID moment: another romantic project, an apocalyptic love story. I have these sonnet videos I'm playing with. I don't know. I'd be curious to know what people think about those. Not really officially anything yet but I was thinking of doing a "season" of them.

An Interview with Robert Glick, Author of Two Californias

Robert Glick is an Associate Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing, electronic literature, and the occasional course on zombies. His work has won competitions from The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Diagram, Summer Literary Seminars, and New Ohio Review; other stories have been published in the Masters Review, Denver Quarterly, and Gettysburg Review. His first collection, Two Californias, was published by C&R Press in 2019.

*

Kristina Marie Darling:  Your latest book, Two Californias, was recently launched by C&R Press.  What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?  

First, thanks for reading! There are so many great books out right now. I hope you find something meaningful and pleasurable in these pages. I hope that the stories don't land too neatly—I'm one who wants a bit of visible messiness. Making treasure from trash, so to speak. 

Speaking as a native Californian, the book is less about California (though all the stories take place there) than it is about, through variation, collapsing overly simplistic boundaries—north and south, etc. While by no means autobiographical, it is more personal than I had originally realized, its spotlights drawn to the unorthodox, sometimes funny, often diversionary ways we deal with loss.

KMD:  What drew you to C&R Press for this particular project?  

They liked the book! It's so important for a press, with the complexities of media economies, to have your back, to support you and the work. I liked C&R's catalogue, their design choices, and the ways in which they wanted to collaborate. It felt ethically as well as aesthetically right, and I'm very grateful to Andrew Sullivan, John Gosslee, and the entire team.

KMD: Your fiction makes innovative use of white space, interruption, and rupture.  What does silence make possible for you as a storyteller?  

Everything. Can noise exist without silence? 

From the standpoint of lineage, the influence of white space came to me from Marguerite Duras, especially the way her blocks of text just sort of hang in air, smoke rings of meanings. For me, silence (and its physical analog, white space) is material, metaphor, tempo. Most of my stories are written modularly, with gaps, often without linear transitions, notated by white space. The reader enters this open space (well, this space is always there, but in Two Californias, it's foregrounded and encouraged) to think, to pause, to insert their consciousness/imaginations. 

The silence also reminds us that the writing, the words, the syntax: nothing but one n/mote, pointing to the more infinite possibilities. The book is not fully closed, can never be fully closed (though one might try). While white space isn't exactly an iceberg, it nonetheless points to everything unsaid. 

KMD:  In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are an accomplished educator. What has teaching opened up within your creative practice?  

Lately, teaching has taught me about the openness and possibility of process. We do a lot of collaborative brainstorming: what could happen in this situation? In what ways can X connect to Y? Writing, for me, represents what Barthes calls a "tissue of citations"—a network of meanings. In this respect, and without dismissing craft, I think about teaching as a means to work with students to be brave and critical in building their own networks. Working with the students has reinforced my own desire to slow down when writing, to pursue possibilities that aren't immediately obvious to me. Then I sneak on to campus late at night, when the classrooms are empty, to make use of the white boards :.)

KMD:  With the recent launch of Two Californias, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?  

I'm on sabbatical(!), so mostly I'm holed up here in Rochester, waiting for the deer to cross the backyard, finishing up The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane. In the short run, I'll be doing a reading/workshop at the wonderful Writers & Books here in Rochester, followed by what I'm sure will be a fabulous University of Utah reading at AWP in San Antonio. Then I head off to the MacDowell Colony in March and April, where I'll visit the oracle each day, and revel in thermoses of soup. I finish off the semester working with the smart, engaged students at Hobart and Smith College in Geneva. 

KMD:  What are you currently working on? What’s next?  

I'm finishing a hybrid print/digital novel called The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane—it should go to agents by the end of the year. 

Set in Kansas City during the 2016 presidential election race, Paradox traces the unorthodox pathways we take through individual grief, collective trauma, and social awareness. After a miscarriage, Grace, a 40-year-old anesthesiologist, must decide whether she wants to have another child, weighing her own desires and her growing political awareness against the constricting biases of suburban life. Her husband Chuck urgently wants to be a father once again. While he waits for Grace to make up her mind, he falls prey to his self-destructive impulses; his imaginary friend, whom he calls The Reckless, forces him to steal a rare, expensive model of Wonder Woman’s airplane. Meanwhile, their two teenagers stumble into dangerous intrigues with Bosnian art saboteurs and rapture-obsessed veterinarians. 

The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane is written as a set of discrete, interlocking sections. Family members and minor characters contribute their distinct voices to the collective narration. The novel also contains non-diegetic chapters, including an MFA thesis in art history (with performative scores) and characters' own creative writings (such as an imagined history of a mysteriously disappeared grandparent). As a general thematic, the novel explores versions of visibility and invisibility (technical, psychological, linguistic) exemplified by the figure of Wonder Woman’s airplane, which, in drawings and animations, requires white lines to make visible the boundaries of the plane’s invisibility. In line with my artistic vision, each section attempts to intensify the emotional and intellectual power of the novel by expressing character-based story through innovative forms of language, voice, and syntax.

Chapters of Paradox have won the Summer Literary Seminars Center for Fiction Prize and the New Ohio Review Contest in Fiction. Other chapters have been published in The Masters Review Anthology. You can read online chapters at The Collagist and The Los Angeles Review. 

While Paradox will primarily take shape in the print universe, some sections of the novel will only be available in digital form (beta).

An Interview with Cris Mazza, Author of Yet to Come

Kristina Marie Darling: Your novel, Yet to Come, will launch soon from BlazeVOX Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Cris Mazza: I’d like readers to assume that Yet to Come can provide different gratifications or provide different responses from different kinds of readers . . . and that any kind of response or take-away is interesting to me. Among the various elements — for example the “setting” of the characters’ mid-lifespans being from the 80s to 2010, the aspects of male-victim spousal abuse, or the subplot of female sexual dysfunction — will come to the forefront in different orders for different readers. I wish I could hear from every reader to see which parts, characters, or story-lines spoke loudest. Basically, I always tried to write books that my mother could read and also my English professors could appreciate.

KMD: You’ve worked with many outstanding literary publishers over the course of your distinguished career.  What drew you to BlazeVOX Books for this particular text? 

CM: First, one of my former PhD students had a recent novel from BlazeVox, so I knew there was an appreciation for literature-off-the-beaten-path. Also, when I looked at the books, they each had a personalized size, shame and design, appropriate for the book itself and not a standard for all of their books.  I knew I would need a publisher sensitive to the repeated postcards in the book, which required the use of different fonts, an image of a postcard, etc. BlazeVox is open to a writer having a mental image and actual production input for what a book looks like as a finished product.

KMD: I admire your experimentation with form, which frequently encompasses templates that are not germane to literary texts:  postcards, lists of problems, handwritten notes, and more. What do these non-literary or found forms make possible within a given narrative? 

CM: I began doing this in earnest in my 2014 memoir Something Wrong With Her because my college journals were essential to the book containing a “me-then” who was not the same person writing the “real time” text. I realized I had to use images of the journals rather than retype the passages I wanted to use — to prevent myself from editing the earlier me. While researching my own cache of artifacts for that book, I found more: the handwritten notes, yearbook inscriptions, hand-drawn cartoons, etc., that I knew had to be seen and not just described. I think the book was able to be urgent and alive in more than one time-zone, from the “real time” text to 40 years earlier.

KMD: Relatedly, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the gender politics of genre. Is experimentation with — and challenging — received forms of discourse an inherently feminist act? Why or why not? 

CM: It traditionally largely hasn’t been. In the 70s and 80s when so much literary prose experimentation was disproportionately by male authors, a simple explanation was provided (I can’t recall the source): these men were rebelling against the established canon; but that canon, being predominately male, was not what women writers were moved to rebel against — they had to create their “canon” first. Instead, the mere act of speaking out at all, having a published written voice, was the initial “rebellion.” Then when I co-edited the “chick-lit” anthologies in the mid-90s, the publisher launched the project as a talent search for unknown or emerging women writers who were beginning more and more to challenge popular expectations of writing-by-women.

It’s difficult for me, personally, to say how the forms in my own writing is or might be a feminist or gender-related gesture because most of the writers who influenced me in terms of form were male since most of the writers taught to me in college were male; and yet the work of one of the female inclusions, Kathy Acker, for whatever reason did not speak to me. Female writers who later participated in my development, from Erica Jong to Alice Munro, were not experimenting so much with form.

KMD: As you promote YET TO COME, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?

I plan to be in my car heading west, to California where the novel is set, and making as many stops along the route was I can manage to arrange. Anyone interested in an event can feel free to contact me. 

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next?

CM: Related to my answer about the insertion of image-artifacts in my work, I’m working on a series of linked essays that make further use of this technique, or using form to “concretize” what the essay is saying. This concept is best characterized by “Ask The Depot Commander” in which the narrative of my father’s recollections of his experience in 1946 Nuremburg, Germany — plus original photos he took there — is formatted to lie side-by-side with researched historical details that correspond to the substances of his memory. For example, he described giving an orange from the Army mess to a German man, whose wife and child ate one segment a day and made the orange last two weeks; this personal anecdote is juxtaposed beside original text of a different tone, explaining U.S. occupation policies that stipulated sharing food with German citizens was against military orders.

Each essay, with a different topic but involving my family, will have a form that suits its needs.

Be Prepared to Travel: An Interview with Clifford Garstang, Author of House of the Ancients and Other Stories

Kristina Marie Darling: Your new book, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, will be launched by Press 53 in May. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Clifford Garstang: First, be prepared to travel. While about half of the stories in the collection are set in the United States, the rest have settings all over the world, including Mexico, Europe, and Central and Southeast Asia. Second, while the stories are mostly grounded in realism, a few of them take a decidedly unreal turn, which I hope readers will find interesting. They’re something of a departure for me.

KMD: You’ve worked with many excellent presses over the course of your career. What drew you to Press 53 for this particular project?

CG: I have a great relationship with Kevin Morgan Watson, the publisher at Press 53. The press also published my first two collections as well as the anthology series I edited, and I worked closely with them on the literary magazine I co-founded with Kevin, Prime Number. The press really understands short story collections—in fact they only publish short fiction and poetry—and when this new collection was ready I knew I wanted them to publish it. Some publishers are all about the novel and short story collections are an afterthought, at best. Not so with Press 53. 

KMD: On the whole, your fiction has a distinctly international sensibility. Tell me what travel has made possible within your creative practice.

CG: Living outside the United States—first in South Korea as a Peace Corps Volunteer, then for a long time in Singapore and later in Kazakhstan—plus extensive overseas travel for work and pleasure has, I think, opened my eyes and strengthened the empathy a fiction writer has to have. Because of that, I’m able, within some limits of course, to write sensitively about people who are different from me. To some extent, I’ll always be writing “what I know,” but pushing the envelope of what that encompasses has meant, for me, looking beyond America.

KMD: In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are well-known for your literary citizenship, making resources available to writers who seek to navigate the ever-expanding landscape of literary journals. I’d love to hear more about what this has opened up within your writing. What has being part of a community made possible for you as a storyteller? 

CG: Years ago, when I was considering a career transition that would allow me to focus on writing, an old grad school professor of mine advised me to enroll in an MFA program because, he asserted, writers need to find a community of other writers. Most of us do our creative work in isolation, but I have found it both comforting and encouraging to emerge from time to time and connect with the community. And the community grows for me as I interact with it—starting with my MFA program, continuing with workshops, conferences, and residencies, and sometimes more remotely such as through the annual literary magazine rankings I’ve been doing now for more than a decade. Being part of the larger community exposes me to different ways of doing things, of telling stories, and relating to readers.

KMD: With the upcoming launch of House of the Ancients and Other Stories, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to? 

CG: The book comes out in May, so I’m planning launch events in Virginia, where I’m based, and North Carolina, where Press 53 is located. We’re still working on setting up readings and other appearances, and I regularly update the Events page on my website, which is cliffordgarstang.com.

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next? 

CG: I have a novel coming out in 2021 called Oliver’s Travels. As the name suggests, it’s about a man named Oliver who travels, and he’s traveling in search of answers to a question his family can’t or won’t answer for him. And I’m currently working on another novel, this one a blended contemporary and historical novel set in Singapore. It’s been fun to do research for that one.

The Erasure and Self-erasure of Women's Voices: A Review of Kristina Marie Darling's Women and Ghosts

The multiple modes of the erasure and self-erasure of women’s voices sit heavy with me this morning. I’ve read a beautiful and daring text entitled Women and Ghosts, by Kristina Marie Darling, which is part essay and part prose-poem, all experimental, where line-throughs, footnotes, multiple narrative lines, and alternating gradients of text are used to tell stories of female negations with silences and near silences—those that speak to the horror one can feel to realize that the acceptance of internalized conditioning to be less, to take up less space, is actually the most dangerous act a woman can commit or condone on a path to empowerment—and these have a long history. Kristina Marie Darling’s Women and Ghosts is a terrifying read, one well worth the time. For me, it felt like a beautiful funeral shroud, a gossamer wrap of a book I was reminded to cut myself free from in order to survive.

In this book, death, denial, self-sacrifice, and romance are inexorably linked. Gender and gender privilege are examined. The author is subversive in her inclusions and omissions, and the lines are meant to be catalysts toward appropriate rage. “In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia drowns under the weight of her own dress,” Women and Ghosts begins. “I had never imagined before that plain white silk could kill.”

But plain white silk didn’t kill, the reader may argue, jarred already by muted color of the words and the obvious falsehood they champion. Since when was a dress capable of killing? Enter now Darling’s world of realigning the reader’s reality by engaging in disruptive discourse. As the author expects the reader to remember, Ophelia, after losing her lover to palace intrigues, drowns herself in Hamlet. Surely her dress is not to blame, and neither is the water in which Ophelia, off-stage, drowns. At a deeper level, all readers familiar with Shakespeare’s play are aware that the lead character Hamlet’s rejection causes Ophelia’s complete self-immolation. And yet, in line one, Darling adjusts the narrative to hide the crime, makes excuses for it, blames a party blameless as a starry night or a sparkling lake, as written history often does, blurring the lines of blame in order to appropriately question them, where the dress in a virginal hue, ode to female innocence or purity, a highly gendered garment, takes betrayal’s place as villain.

Welcome to the nightmare gender labyrinth of refutation and disavowal. Not to read too much into this single line, but I already felt a chill travel my spine to see the exchange of correctly placed blame for self-defeating symbology and experienced a simultaneous awareness that this chill was intentionally created by the skillful author to highlight the contrast text the reader proceeds with as a paralleled modern “I” woman examines Ophelia’s plight and concurrently exists in a terrifying room where lovers spar and the ambient temperature grows colder and colder, as a modern man serves her joint bouts of gaslighting and liquor, tantamount to emotional abuse. Between doses of his cruelty and lack of returned care, in a sort of willful thought departure, the narrator muses on the aspects of Hamlet’s Ophelia plot most difficult and “unsayable,” at one point asking, “But what does it mean to give one’s consent? We are led and misled by those we love…” where a similar facility of displacement puts the reader right into the ghosted narrative of being two places at once, both interred in a historical play with a dead female victim of self-slaughter and standing in the midst of a new tragic history played out, where the “I” protagonist, already muted by pale ink, lives through a similar sort of identity reduction.

It is telling enough that this modern narrator says, “When he smiled, I felt my whole body grow colder,” where it seems as if a man’s cold judgment, masked by the false mirth of a smile, is on deliberate parallel with a lake in which to drown. Darling’s use of white space here, of incomplete interactions, of dissonance in the said/unsaid, is masterful.

Enter Shakespeare’s own words, often, as foil. Boldly on the pages that follow this opening line, interlacing at strategic intervals, the font periodically darkens, and the reader finds lined-through quotes from the bard, carefully excerpted to highlight the age old dilemma of inadequate self-valuation, of lost agency, of roles, one of such line-through excerpts reading, for example, “And I, of ladies most deject and wretched…”

Here we see the duality of the work’s intent. On the one hand, this text receiving line-through, seems an empowering strategy where Ophelia’s self-negation is defeated by being struck from the record by a female author. However, it is also a female author’s inclusion of a man’s depiction of a woman’s defeat in darker text than the narrative of the modern fictive woman beside it. As in a painting, a color is best read in context, beside another color—so, surrounded by the pale gray text of the I narrator, the stronger hue of a man’s words, lined out or not, seem to extend the struck sentiment well beyond the century in which it was crafted.

The status quo to be combatted, Darling’s line-through subtext seems to read, is hundreds of years of powerlessness in love. The status quo is women, in literature and life, silenced by men, whether they be those written by male authors as foils to kill for moments of tragic beauty in plays or simply real life lovers in the average living room scene of standard living—it is, after all, Shakespeare who killed Ophelia as a plot device, he who chose her undoing and drew a pretty bow on the tragedy of the tragedy of Hamlet. But you’ll note, in the tradition of entitling tragedies (Antigone, MacBeth, King Lear), that the title character is usually the protagonist. And Ophelia, memorable as she is, Darling wishes to remind us, has never had a play as her namesake. The tragedy was larger than the woman who died for it, her loss relegated to being just a pittance in another man’s more important drama.

It is a whirlwind ride to enter and learn the ways of reading this book, requiring more than just the absorption of words. One must stare at the pages and internalize the import in the way space and color is used. What is bold or shown in a darker font creates relevance in multiple sections where it seems a philosophical question has been asked of the reader, one with multiple hard answers. For my part, I found I was trained by the text to read with excitement when dark lines came, always hoping for more from a female voice rather than a male voice—yet, nearly each time Darling’s women spoke in dark font, what I came away with was a deepening sorrow where Darling had not given these women much voice but actually instead turned the screws of depicting a torturous silencing game, “my lord…my lord,” to reveal yet more dissection about how women’s institutionalized devaluation can be a learned, continuous, and self-regulating structure. It does so via reaching through much of Shakespeare’s canon—be forewarned, this book takes on more plays than solely Hamlet, pausing to meditate in women’s roles in others like Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Titus Andronicus, and more.

It then introduces the I character as a playwright and again establishes parallels between the doomed female characters in Shakespeare’s theatrical work and the hard work of women trying to write the matter that becomes publicly influential. A particularly difficult segment to read for this reader was the section called “Essays on Production,” where the “I” narrator discusses her work as an author of plays and the staging and reviews of her plays. For the entire segment, many pages long, the “I” character not only has a mute gray voice, a ghosted presence, but all her words are lined-through as well. Devastating. One excerpt that held my attention a good long while is found below, where a critic subjects our protagonist to the standard double-standard faced by women in the arts: Judgement made personal where slut-shaming is so ubiquitous it flows uncensored and there is no appropriate response for the artist to make since the artist, not the art, is on trial:

One critic did deliver a verdict, suggesting there must be some underlying reason that I cared so much about Ophelia, an unconscious obsession with the torn dress, a fixation on ruined clothing. I was the whore, the wronged beloved, the bride abandoned at the altar. I stood accused, but when I tried to plead my case, I found I could no longer speak.

So, if I am female, should I make myself more mute, are there more ways to do so, the narrative seems to ask the reader in multiple sections, with many strategies—and would you like to watch for how many centuries the same story of this abjuration repeats itself?

As Darling’s work in Women and Ghosts alternates between representations of Shakespearean women and scenes with or about her “I” narrator, the resultant despair that ensues for this reader is heightened when I am carried along as witness to the crimes, to the travesties, when the act of self-silencing as visible on the page actually serves as a cautionary tale to inspire agency for doing the opposite.

Perhaps an awakening for the reader was the goal of this book, the wake-up call, the warning. I am now awake. Thank you, Ms. Darling. One wants to test one’s voice after reading Women and Ghosts, to make sure it still works. Rarely does one read a book that holds such a narrative of disturbing dualities. Via stunning use of erasure and white space, Darling creates the kind of poetic narrative that twists the puzzles of representation in so many directions that the reader comes to live in both the darkness and the lightness of the font, in its presence and its absence.

Women and Ghosts is a trompe l’oeil of a book.   Inspired is the word I’d use to describe it, difficult, revelatory. Darling has written a text that speaks deeply to the violence of silence, of choosing silence, of being silenced. Anyone who has experienced this sort of relationship or actuality in reality may have a difficult time with this read. It brings it all back.

Women and Ghosts is a truly important book, the kind of book I would lovingly give to a female friend, but about which I would say: “This will hurt to read, but read it. Then read it again… Let us then talk and see what we can do to change upcoming history. And let’s make a different history, starting now.”

What Certainty In Reaping: A Review of Kristina Marie Darling's Failure Lyric

In the throes of my divorce a couple years ago, I heard Elizabeth Bishop in an old radio interview pointing out that we humans get divorced all the time. She was answering a question about the damage divorce might inflict on children. My son was 5 at the time and I pulled my car over, trembling, to more safely hear Bishop forecast his fate from her grave. She went on to explain that we are divorced from things constantly—we are divorced from loved ones who die, we are divorced from places we lived, we are divorced from stuffed animals. I thought of the time my son lost his favorite blankey by the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Bishop was saying we are fooling ourselves if we think the dynamics of divorce are somehow discreet from so many other aspects of life that children and the rest of us all have to get used to. Loss is a constant. I extrapolated: what distinguishes divorce may well be all the good that came before it, and the sheer possibility that goodness could go on forever. As opposed to the life cycle that will inevitably cease, love—placed under glass by the act of marriage—might just never end.

Until it does.

Kristina Marie Darling’s Failure Lyric is a certain post-mortem in that regard. A stirring meditation on her own divorce, Darling’s work turns a wintered eye to that dimension of the good that came before. If it’s possible for poetics to be clinical, Darling has done it. And that’s only part of what makes this work remarkable. Far from sentimental, Failure Lyric is artful in its meticulously limited scope. This work does not chart a rise and fall; it doesn’t depict the good times. It does not rage or blame. The only nod to “the way we were” centralizes around conspicuous disaccumulations (remembered references to “his last wife,” her ex’s inattention at ripe moments).

Instead, Darling populates a menagerie of haunting creatures and notions around her varied tracings of the past. A common theme is loss of voice, stopped-up throats. Both bride and groom stutter, cough, clear their throats; “when I saw you again, the trees swallowed their tongues,” “I tried to eat but the (wedding) cake lodged in the hollow space of my throat,” “I tried to kiss you but my mouth was frozen shut.”

Through this image-rich, serial misrecollection, Darling’s work affixes a death mask onto her marriage. Her text offers over and over—with more fervor as we approach the conclusion—“let me tell you a story about marriage.” And indeed she does. By remembering and re-remembering her dress, the cake, waiting at the altar—as a macabre parade towards disaster—these items (broken glass, fire and ice, dead birds that “said nothing“) come together to retrospectively call for the union’s severance, precisely at the site of its high ritual.

Towards the end of my marriage, my ex mostly shot a massive blank. It’s been four years since I moved out, and we talk all the time about practical matters. About the larger impracticality of splitting up after 10 years and a child, however, he just never had much to say for himself. I told him I was leaving and he pretty much said “I thought so.” By then he had developed a tic of saying “I love you” at times when things were most certainly not sweet, forget timely. I knew this meant he wondered if I still loved him. But more than anything it highlighted the fact that he had nothing to say for himself. No sound came out when it really mattered. I don’t remember the last time I told him I loved him, but I surely stopped sooner than I would have, since he made it a cringe-worthy meme.

Nowadays I throw away most pictures I find of our early days. Not because I’m mad, but because they are over, and a preserved fistful is enough.

Darling’s work has its culminating image in [Memento] (Conclusion to [A Garden]) where the author is viewing butterflies pinned under glass, and a docent informs her “the placard can’t be trusted … at the time the glass case was built, the specimen wasn’t quite dead.” It was “not quite dead” (as opposed to “alive”) even upon its glass encasement. This work is about what happens after the glass has been smashed. It dwells in the end-space. By remembering its key moments as already dead, in fascinating variations, the text haunts the marriage itself. I am left convinced that this is not a book about love. It is more properly about death.

So what though? Who cares. What failure?

Let’s be clear that in the hearts and minds of most who have passed through it, “divorce” is a linguistic foil for “failure.” You usually decline to own it by calling it “my divorce,” in the same way as many demure referring to “my cancer.” There’s something definitive about an experience that is so highly personal yet eschews ownership. There is usually no pride involved. You “get” a divorce (much as you “get” cancer). You never “make” a divorce, but you often “go through” one. You pass. It is a space between spaces, a River Styx if you will.

The word “divorce” itself sounds so legalistic, and can’t help but conjure images of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in War Of The Roses. But what divorce actually feels like, no matter whether you willed it or not, is quite simply, failure. The linguistic “failure” foil is mostly unspoken, though crushingly experienced for anyone up close to it. After signing my final divorce papers with my ex, I broke down sobbing in the corporate courtyard outside. This came as a surprise given how much distance I thought I had gotten from the whole fact of it. No matter how tired I was of dealing with the various debt streams and custody arrangements and microtasks associated with the legal process; no matter how much my loved ones were cheering me on to finish up and how boisterously I was parroting their encouragement and getting it echoed back at me by my ex cum co-parent in the form of chest bumps; I was stunned to find myself walking out of the mediator’s office feeling plain and simple like I had failed. All the student loans and cars, credit cards, family planning and career moves had amounted to this. It was a feeling very different from regret or dreading the future, but sad and painful like full sinuses on an erupted tooth root, electricity to the nerve.

Failure may be beside the point, except to state the obvious about what divorce feels like. In its calculation, Failure Lyric reminded me of this core truth. In spite of its empirical poetics, this is a dead-on work, grounded in deep pain. Darling nails the hypnotic, heart-stopping thrall that awaits you at the end of your (not “any”) marriage.

I’m still not sure if my ex-husband is ok with being divorced. Four years later and he’s as close to getting remarried as I am, he’s as indifferent and supportive towards me as I am towards him (which is to say a lot, on both counts). We are both 100% engaged in the joint endeavor of teaching our son about what’s immortal and what’s finite, how and when to move on from the scene of a crime, and all the ways in which life cannot be a Disney musical.

Was there a moment when it could have been saved? A needle that could have been threaded? One thing my ex did say around the time it was all falling apart was “no one is fighting for us anymore.” It marked his submission to what was inevitably happening, by virtue of the engine of me, what certainty in reaping I was able to muster for once in my life. No one is fighting for us anymore. Maybe if I had answered back, “well why don’t you try?,” that would’ve been the moment. At the time I assumed it meant his various pseudo-Catholic relatives were no longer urging him to make it work; that they had pulled down their anti-sin sails in deference to that larger sin which was me. It was surrender with a stink, so I shut up.

I didn’t care that no one was fighting for us anymore. I wanted it over. But the thought of him settling in with this knowledge almost wrecked me that night- the first we first decided to sleep separately. Knowing he was alone in the guest room with his legs sideways clutching a pillow the way he did whenever I travelled overnight throughout our marriage, I heaved with pain the likes of which I couldn’t survive many times again. It was seeing his utter desolation, taming my heart into beating normally around him as a separate object, which I had abandoned.

Failure Lyric mentions twice the notion of threading the eye of a needle. That if something was to be done, it would need to be precise. In “Prayer,” the author envisions her lost love appearing before her “like a white horse through the eye of a needle.” Precise, and very romantic—as laughably out of place in the surrounding text as a man on a white horse. The second iteration refers to “cities where we lived” as “threads spinning through the eye of a needle” and goes on to illustrate loss of familiarity in the quotidian: “the freeway no longer led to the subway station” (read: your ex is not on a business trip, she has left you; your ex still exists, you just kicked him out of your bed). The reference to lost cities calls forth that faithful Bishop divorce poem “One Art:”

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

One of the last lines of Kristina Marie Darling’s Failure Lyric states starkly, “I’ve travelled only to stop.” Darling’s work itself is a stop. A glottal stop. defined as “a consonant formed by the audible release of the airstream after complete closure of the glottis.”

You must will yourself to write that it isn’t a disaster. But I’m happy Darling paused before she did that. When you are no longer moving, you are afraid you’ve travelled only to stop. You get wrung in by your own ghosts. Darling’s opening to her Preface Erasureasserts what I managed to tell myself that first night alone—“you can’t fight for the dead, only sleep.”

Intractable Ghosts or Kristina Marie Darling’s Personal and Imaginative World in The Sun & the Moon

Sometimes an extraordinary book lands on your doorstep and you’re grateful to be astonished again. Kristina Maria Darling’s The Sun & the Moon is a beauty to behold. A surprising, masterfully written long prose poem that reads like a novel, it weaves a story of a marriage deconstructed in a fantastical, surreal setting, whose strangeness is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe: “I tore into the envelope & there was only winter inside, not even a card or a handwritten note.”

We’re invited into a mysterious, hypnotic, universe unfolding like a party: “You began as a small mark on the horizon. Then night & its endless train of ghosts. You led them in, one after the other. They took off their shoes, hung their coats & started looking through the drawers.” The reader can only fall in love with the ingenious writing as she/he falls under the spell of this haunted love story that reads like a long dream sequence.

Both modern and timeless, it echoes into past centuries, with eerie references to bouquets, lockets, and love notes: “I became aware of your voice calling me from the stairs, warning me about the silver lock on the door.” It reminded me of The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, with its tight writing, suspense, and destruction. Inhabited by ghosts, disquieting, The Sun & the Moon compels the reader to sort out the living from the dead:

“One by one the ghosts left for the ocean, dragging the cold dark stairs behind them.”

“You just stand there & stare, your suit covered in ash, the altar catching fire behind you.”

“Still you just stand there, light shimmering in your hair, the room catching fire all around you.”

We inhabit a dreamlike universe filled with fire and ice, where past and present mingle:

“Before I know it, we’ve started another fire.”

“I could already feel the sky burning through the ice on my dress.”

“Somehow you keep dreaming, heaving that frozen sky behind you.”

I love Darling’s alchemy of turning destruction and despair into something so exquisitely beautiful, painful, and seductive all at once. We’re reminded of the searing poetry of Djuna Barnes in Nightwood: “That’s what I loved about you. Somehow you just stand there, a handkerchief folded in your pocket, the room burning all around you.”

Through repetitions like mantras, incantations, iteration and reiteration, Darling weaves circles within circles, holding the reader captive and mesmerized:

“There was nothing I could do, so I kept trying to tell you good night.

“I could only stare.”

“By then I could hardly speak.”

“It’s the strangest things that keep me from leaving.”

“We stand there and watch…”

In their crumbling inner world, the two main characters are petrified and set afire at the same time, the narrator constantly on edge:

“It’s always the smallest things that put me on edge.”

“It’s always the strangest things that make me feel restless.”

She finds comforts in darkness and is unsettled by light: “and I was unsure if the light was a promise or a threat.” A very Jamesian sense of fatality is pervasive throughout the book. The narrator comes to terms with the implacable and finds a form of acceptance:

“By then I was sure there was nothing that could be done.”

“By then there wasn’t much that could be done.”

“I realized how little I knew about our house…”

“My desire to romanticize, I realized, had been a form of grief.”

A story of perseverance, testament to human stealth and endurance, mystery and ritual, The Sun & the Moon celebrates the redeeming power of beauty: “Still I wondered how you could ever leave, to live as a king without his court, without his crown.”