Look To Your Left
A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle
Kristina Marie Darling
9781629221212
206 pages
University of Akron Press
Overview
The essays in the collection examine, from a variety of perspectives and conceptual standpoints, the ways performative language in contemporary poetry can be politically charged. The poetic text, then, becomes a spectacle, which ultimately renegotiates the power dynamics implicit in the simple act of looking. As the language unfolds before the reader, they are involved and implicated in a revision of what is and what always has been an unequal share of power on the stage of textual authorship and readerly interpretation. In Look to Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle, Darling grounds these ambitious theoretical discussions (and interventions) in poetry by women, non-binary writers, and writers of color, with a particular emphasis on texts that have been heretofore undertheorized.
Author Bio
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-six books, which include Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry, from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group; Daylight Has Already Come: Selected Poems 2014-2020, which will be published by Black Lawrence Press; Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; Silent Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Feminist Poetry, forthcoming from Black Ocean; Angel of the North, which is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which will be launched by Persea Books in the United States. Penguin Random House Canada will also publish a Canadian edition. Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; six residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which she received on two separate occasions; an artist-in-residence position with the Andorran Ministry of Culture; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions; among many other awards and honors. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly.
