Requited

"""Where would I travel if you hadn't stopped me on the bridge to a brighter city,"" asks the narrator of Requited, Kristina Marie Darling's brilliant new essay-in-fragments. These spare, elegant prose poems describe a love affair salted like the ""marble façade"" of its frozen freeways. Lush flowers brittle into ""iced-over fields of dead poppies"" where ""plaster doves have cracked from the cold."" Each poem poses a question meant to haunt the reader, much as Darling's mysterious narrator is haunted by miscommunication: ""There are always so many things that can go wrong in a conversation."" This gorgeous collection evokes passionate emotion through precise imagery and startling detail: ""You are the display of lights. / & now cold water, / its bitter taste.""--Carol Guess, author of Tinderbox Lawn and Doll Studies: Forensics"Why," Kristina Marie Darling asks, or, more exactly, doesn't ask but states in the form of questions in her star dusted book of meteorites, "Why can so many things be mistaken for metaphors." Metaphors, meteorites, these are the last telegrams of nano "narrative." Distilled fragments, de-can't-ed, that are then fermented again in the redacted and deduced subliminal "Epilogue. These are subatomic automatons, little engines that should. They are like, well, liking. They are like nothing else. And I like liking all this liking. --Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter