Kristina Marie Darling &
Carol Guess. Gold Wake Press, $15.95 paperback (102p) ISBN: 9780985919153
There are the things we want, the things
we need—and the things we end up with. These items, exquisitely catalogued in
Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess’s wedding day registry, X Marks the Dress, form a “parade of
memorable objects.”
And leading the procession is the dress.
Selected with antiquity in mind, history advises that the wedding dress
embodies more than the betrothed’s suitability and attractiveness; wearing so
fragile an outfit also invites ruin. Ruin in the bride’s inability to
anticipate the “inevitable interpretation” of an outfit selected for wearing only
once yet expected to represent for a lifetime, and ruin in the actual garment:
its delicacy in color and fabric, its inclination to stain or tear.
In a cultural ceremony that signals
“twin halves of the mortgage or the company car,” man and woman “mark each
other” with mementos like the veil and ring. And if “nostalgia begins at home,”
these wedding day adornments become sentimental touchstones in a life of car
washes and lost jobs. The new wife will certainly run the risk of finding
herself “prettiest in a wedding album, every ruffle on [her] dress neatly
pressed, every strand of [her] hair in place,” but she is after all a bride for
just one day; thereafter, she is “bridled.”
So husband and wife bedeck their shared home
with the items once earnestly listed in a wedding registry and intended to
carry them across the roughest of marital waters. If the bride’s “dress begins
a sea,” the newlyweds bob amid the objects of their well-stocked life. And when
the marriage begins to dissolve and wedding gifts go adrift, sentimental trinkets
intended as ballasts prove instead to be “dead weight,” each souvenir carrying
with it the loaded acknowledgment that “there are always mementos.”
It is within the space carved out by the
Darling and Guess collaboration that these keepsakes—outwardly all pastel frosting
and silky flounce—prove themselves capable of provocation. Through their innovative
union, the poets embark on an assignment of not only the ways these objects
mean, but the shifting language that ascribes their meaning.
Objects may arrange themselves within intimacy but they refuse to settle there,
instead re-imagining and re-documenting and re-distributing themselves as profound
signifiers of coupledom, identity, and individuality.
And if even as she turns from the altar
the bride’s dress has begun to unravel, working to “sever a lie from the life
it’s leading” may seem a straightforward task. Yet for Darling and Guess, who
appear to follow the thread that undoes itself with as much fervor as the
reader, a splitting into simultaneous sequences occurs that makes a simple snip impossible. After all, “history
begins with the future” and to sever is to suppress.
X
Marks the Dress proves itself a marriage of equals, yet
Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess’s wedded bliss bristles at what is
reflected in the “silver mirrors [that] surround the secret.” Projecting from the
speculative space between declarative registry entries and leading the parade
along a deconstructed and disconcerting route, this poetic passage between
persons and personas is certainly worthy of our observance. (August 2013)
Purchase X Marks the Dress HERE.
Reviewer bio: Erin McKnight is the
publisher of Queen’s Ferry Press. Her own writing has been nominated for the
Pushcart Prize and W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction, and
her reviews of fiction and poetry can be found in multiple venues. Erin lives
in Dallas with her husband and young daughter.
