Instructions for Staging - a Poetry Collaboration by Kristina Marie Darling & Carol Guess

Publication Date: August 1, 2017
Paperback, 100 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-37-3

Available from Small Press Distribution

In this new poetry collaboration from Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess, the real estate phenomenon of “home staging” becomes a metaphor for the illusions, and dissolution, of marriage. Or more broadly, of modern life in general, of lives not lived but “curated”, everything transpiring and shared in real time that seems ever less real. The title of one section is especially telling, drawing upon the realtor cliché to “Depersonalize Your Home” – a process that must necessarily destroy any notion of “home” in favor of creating a fictive space, the detritus of messy human lives brushed aside to make room for artifice, for fantasy. On many pages this takes the form of footnotes that suggest an absurd invisible narrative, revealed only in fragments that do not make up a whole – in itself another apt metaphor. This collection is often funny, but in the wry wincing way of experiences that make a good story to recount years after, once survived. To turn these pages is to open the door on a tableau presented by two richly imaginative poets who know where to set each piece for the maximum effect – even if they may leave you looking for a way out of this dream home.

Praise for Instructions for Staging:

These prose poems are loaded with far more than 21 secrets for staging a home: so many footnotes, curios, erasures, appendices; so many ways to lose oneself, one’s partner, one’s lover. A marriage comes undone “like a key made of soap” as does a house for sale boasting a “mysterious chiffonier” with endless drawers and a spiral staircase that “is actually a dragon’s mouth.” Reading it is like facing a deluge with a dishtowel—one is never as prepared as one initially thought to miss the strange secrets.

—Timothy Carlo Matos, author of Counting Sheep Till Doomsday

Weaving the jargon of real estate with the language of divorce, Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess create a book that is equal parts black humor and human insight through the juxtaposition of new-home optimism and the dissolution of the narrators' relationship. Instructions for Staging shows us the dynamism of their collaboration: inventive and bittersweet, resulting in a darkly playful read.

—Robin F. Brox, author of Sure Thing

In eloquent yet conversational lines seething with nostalgia, the solitary broodings on love’s impermanence in Instructions for Staging wiretap as much into the secrets we keep from one another as ourselves. “My favorite sound is my name in your mouth,” muses the conceited husband, whose infidelities the wife tackles with the same rage & patience as the mayo he smears over cabinets while sleepwalking. A bloodbath lurks throughout & even household objects are endowed with danger: mail is slit open, phonograph needles are “poised to kill.” Calmly & quietly, we are invited to pick the locks with soap & kitchen knives—to break & enter & eavesdrop into the quiet desperation of a modern American marriage in shambles: “Turn your head without turning your eyes.”

—Scott Alexander Jones, author of elsewhere &
That Finger on Your Temple is the Barrel of My Raygun

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of twenty-seven books of poetry, most recently Ghost / Landscape (with John Gallaher) and the forthcoming Dark Horse. Her awards include three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet, as well as a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, a Fundacion Valparaiso Fellowship, and three residencies at the American Academy in Rome. She is the recipient of grants from the Whiting Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund. Her poems appear in New American Writing, The Harvard Review, The Mid-American Review, Poetry International, Passages North, Nimrod, and many other magazines. She has published essays in Agni, The Gettysburg Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor-in-Chief at Tupelo Press, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly.

Carol Guess is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Doll Studies: Forensics and Tinderbox Lawn. In 2014 she was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University. A frequent collaborator, she teaches in the MFA program at Western Washington University.