Kristina Marie Darling
Beyond Metaphor: On Prose by Chris Campanioni & Elizabeth Powell
By Kristina Marie DarlingIn his book The Dialogic Imagination, M. M. Bakhtin observes that “the poetic symbol presupposes the unity of a voice with which it is identical, and presupposes that such a voice is completely alone within its own discourse.
The Aesthetics of Silence: New Books by Ilya Kaminsky & Donna Stonecipher
By Kristina Marie DarlingIn a 2007 essay, Chris P. Miller asserts that “silence is a chronology, a beginning collapsed into the end.” For Miller, silence manifests as the first—and truest—form of compression, a charged and dense rhetorical space in which even time folds in on itself. Susan Sontag describes this remarkable compression not as a destructive force, but rather, as transcendence, a sure sign of language sublimating into dream, insight, and artistic vision. Approached with these ideas in mind, the gaps between words, lines, stanzas, and prose paragraphs becomes charged with possibility, a liminal space in which the rules governing speech no longer hold.
