The Moon and Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling

In The Moon and Other Inventions, Kristina Marie Darling has constructed a one-sixteenth scale palace of enchanted footnotes. She writes, “Behind a little door the mechanism was turning and turning.” So too do the parts of this book turn and turn: readers will find themselves inside of a dream that is also a three- (or four- or five-) dimensional space. Emily Dickinson opens a door to find Alice Liddell, who opens a door to find Lorine Niedecker. Who could resist such knobs and dials and keys?

—Angela Sorby, author of Bird Skin Coat

Darling creates a lattice of explicitly feminine apperception around the works of Joseph Cornell. The result is a haunting parascription, of a piece with Cornell's metaphysical idiom while substantially Othering any sustained encounter with his work.

—G.C. Waldrep, author of Goldbeater's Skin

The fine poems of Kristina Marie Darling embrace the complexities of telemetry: how to read the stars and the heart, peregrinations, P and R waves, a universe implied. Underneath the text, underneath narrative, Darling calculates what matters, and the matter of a woman endeavoring to build a perfect, delicate machine. Would that be a poem? A telescope? A metaphor? All of the above.

—Alan Michael Parker, author of Long Division

In this age of hyperlinkages, the footnote has acquired a nostalgic sheen, similar to that of the optical instruments and gears that populate The Moon and Other Inventions. Joining a group of contemporary works that investigate the lyric and narrative potentials of the footnote, this sequence adds the thrill of ekphrasis to a suggestive paratextual zone.

—Jena Osman, author of The Network

The Moon & Other Inventions takes us back in time and into a parallel universe whose stars are footnotes, though they don't seek to validate so much as subvert our common authorities. Kristina Marie Darling knows that time is close to the divine, and likely beyond divinity's reach: [t]he clock within this cathedral recorded the movements of minor stars. But from its interior a series of unfamiliar notes emerged, that ominous ringing. She knows that science gets curious, too: [o]ne of the lesser known experiments, in which scientists were fascinated with the involuntary movements of the female heart. She knows that the mechanical doesn't separate us from the natural as did the emperor's nightingale--the phonograph, with its projection of unusual bird calls, was regarded as an evil device--but brings us closer--""I had wanted to preserve the measurements, their pristine order. Each of the charts was a tiny mirror held to the sun's oblique orbit."" In this impressionistic steampunk elegy to Caroline Herschel and all the Alice girls, we might oscillate unchecked between the story-rich points of heaven's dome.

—Danielle Pafunda, author of My Zorba

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of five books of poetry and the editor of a forthcoming anthology, narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers (Moria Books, 2012). She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her poems and essays appear in The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Third Coast, and Verse Daily. A graduate of Washington University and the University of Missouri, Kristina is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 66 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-104-7