Trespassing in the Archive

Kristina Marie Darling is author of over thirty volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction.

In Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus declares that 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' Nearly a century's worth of nightmares, both factual and refractory, farther along, poetry finds itself once again fascinated with history as a literal substance and real-world destination. And so the works that Kristina Darling has gathered here might more accurately be described as expeditions rather than essays. Each has its particular valor and passionate curiosity. Taken all together, they constitute a marvelous wakefulness and revelation.

• 1. The Surface of the Break: A Theory of Archival Aesthetics (John James)2. “As If God Made the Picture and Matched It with a Living Hieroglyph”: Myth, Symbol, and Subjectivity in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (Kristina Marie Darling)3. The Afterlives of a Ming Courtesan: The Re-Invention of Zhang Qiao (1615-1633) in Chinese Cultural Products (Haihong Yang)4. “Flint and Tinder – Understanding the Difference Between ‘Poetry of Witness’ and ‘Documentary Poetics’” (Sandra Beasley)5. Archival Renegotiations of the U.S.-México Border: An Autoethnography (D. Seth Horton)6. To Tinker with the Machinery of Death: Conceptual Poetry and Archival Justice (J.S. Westbrook)7. Catching Our Country's Historical Moment in American Poems (Ibis Gomez-Vega)8. A Wind Kept Blowing in My Body: The Archives as Song with Victoria Chang, Deborah Paredez, and Mai Der Vang (Tiffany Troy)