Scorched Altar Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014

"It is in the very restlessness of her metaphors that Kristina Darling documents a tangible faith. Such restlessness is trustworthy and always, throughout Scorched Altar, both vital and in plain view. Here are truthful experiments. Here is a new tradition, alive in bright air.--Donald RevellKristina Marie Darling's hypnotic poems and stories resurrect the often forgotten parts of books. Under her direction, footnotes, indexes, and glossaries become jewels, 'iridescent, when held to the light.' This is haunting and beautifully crafted work.--Chloe Honum Kristina Darling ransacks the apparatus of the Romantic imaginary and repurposes its vestigial and spectral forms. In these stories and poems, features from the textual margins--footnote, glossary, subplot, index--eclipse the center, signaling blindspots in accounts of possession and desire. Scorched Altar isolates and revolves the tropes of melancholic femininity--moon, bird, star, stillness--reconfiguring an interiority of semiotic swoon. The word "luminous" recurs, becoming an antique mirror too tarnished to reflect, a surface that reveals only enigma and miniature: "Thus his presentation of the earring, with its tiny pewter bird, reminded her of the ocean--its pristine shores and frigid tides, but also the potential for vertigo." Darling's procedures expose the gothic psyche still haunting the lyric mode, and the dissonance it bequeaths: ""I had wanted to discover the cold metal gears winding beneath the firmament. Now the most fearful disruption of a delicate machine.""--B. K. Fischer