Dark Horse

Meet Jane Dark--both the everywoman and the uberwoman--who tries "to ache more beautifully" as she suffers the indignities of a husband's infidelity and the "other wife." In a series of stunning prose poems entitled "Sad Film," Kristina Marie Darling sublimely describes the strains of a relationship without "even a cough to break the silence." This inventive writer re-imagines the cultural scripts of heartache and the relationship imperative white honoring the pain and chaos of betrayal as well as the violence for which we are capable. DARK HORSE is a masterful pastiche, repeating phraseology transforming and deepening its meaning from poem to poem.

--Denise Duhamel