Melancholia

Product Description In Melancholia (An Essay), a lock of tangled hair, a necklace's broken clasp, and a shattered jewelry box appear as artifacts of the heroine's loss. This stunning essay-in-poems reads as both a love story and a collection of memorable objects, the significance of each being revealed to the reader in elliptical, adeptly controlled prose narratives. Also filled with fragmented forms including footnotes to absent texts, incomplete letters, and partial glossaries, Darling's new collection asks whether memory can be confined to the margins, in the end suggesting the unmatched intensity of mourning, melancholia, and personal transformation. Review Darling's collection is filled with fractured love tokens--as well as fragmented forms: self-conscious footnotes,definitions, and glossaries of terms. These elliptical poems, obsessive and oblique, gleam from the dark world of Darling's Noctuary--that record of what passes in the night --Anna Journey, author of If Birds Gather Your Hair for NestingThe experience of reading this essay is like being an explorer and discovering a love story-in-poems in a land where poems are memories. Darling's meditations arrive as letters, definitions, lists, missing text with footnotes, and glossaries. Melancholia touch and moved me with its delicacy, and thrilled me with its subversions. A lovely, tender book. --Molly Gaudry, author of If We Take Me ApartTrembling with shine, Melancholia is a new jewel in the continuing assemblage of sparse and bright words from Kristina Marie Darling. This book sparkles with lonesome fragments and open space, with the quiet bruises of falling apart. --J.A. Tyler, author of In Love With a Ghost. About the Author Kristina Marie Darling is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Night Songs (Gold Wake Press, 2010), Compendium (Cow Heavy Books, 2011 and Vardaman Books, 2012), and The Body is a Little Gilded Cage: A Story in Letters & Fragments (Gold Wake Press, 2011). She's also the editor of a forthcoming anthology, narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers (Moria Books, 2012).