Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations

• Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations
• Price: $16.00
• Nonfiction / Essays -- PB
• 978-1-936196-64-7
• LCCN: 2016950660
• Coming March 2017

“Intense” + “Charming” + “Groundbreaking”

RELEASED MARCH 2017

Je Suis L’Autre: Essays and Interrogations, is a collection of lyric criticism that speaks to a rapidly changing literary landscape, with elements of personal narrative, craft analysis, and cultural commentary. By offering a hybrid approach to scholarly writing, Darling’s prose establishes a poetic sensibility as it examines a wide range of recent experimental and collaborative works of literature. The diverse texts discussed in this essay collection include Julie Marie Wade’s Wishbone, Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians, G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher’s Your Father On The Train Of Ghosts, Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women, Suzanne Scanlon’s Her 37th Year: An Index, and many others. Throughout Darling’s book, recent works of literature offer a point of entry to more ambitious questions about voice, affect, and conscious experience.

HYPE

“Kristina Marie Darling might be the best poetry book club moderator you never met yet. Her reflections and ruminations are perfect for those readers seeking a friendly and engaging introduction to the theories and concerns underlying some of the more experimental works and movements in contemporary American poetry. The essays in this collection are also a delight for those who already appreciate these works, but want a smart, thoughtful companion with whom they can share the reading experience. With a groundbreaking style of literary analysis that is personal, charming, and elegant, Je Suis L’Autre reinvents the genre of literary criticism as a form of insightful critique that will also pour you a cup of tea, then wait with interest and patience while you collect your own thoughts to share.”

– Kathryn Nuernberger

“It is pure pleasure to follow along as Kristina Marie Darling explores compelling contemporary poetry and prose in her new book of essays. She does not shy away from difficulty (in the texts nor in her own thought) at all, rather she embraces it by structuring the essays and the book around a continuous chain of questions she asks both herself and the reader. Because of the level of erudition one is tempted to say that reading this book is like attending a really well-structured lecture, but that’s not it all, because this book feels collaborative. In that sense the more appropriate metaphor is to say I feel like I am in a seminar room, arguing through these ideas with someone who is as invested in my ideas about the text as in her own.”

– Kazim Ali

“Here you will find the essay as luminous attention held to contemporary lyric experiments of poetry and prose in writing that spools out from questions Darling poses about the possibilities of poetry, of subjectivity, of speech in our current time. These essays are a pleasure and take pleasure in the relational quality of the texts they take up, highlighting the connection writers find in other writers as source, as collaboration, as dialogue. Often pulling trios of works into constellation Darling herself writes a prose of response, her essays concluding with lyrically-infused remarks that carry the echo of what has come before into the next essay. Darling writes that “To be human is to be a conversation,”—a conversation her work so generously opens to us by inviting us to take part.”

– Karla Kelsey