Observable Readings

Observable Readings Celebrates the New Year with Eileen G'Sell, Steven Schroeder, and Kristina Marie Darling on Monday, Jan. 3

Thursday, December 02, 2010 at 06:41 PM

Kristina Marie Darling leads an insurgency of young St. Louis writers concerned with the tropes of non sequitur, metonymy, and hyperbole; the prose format in the small press poetry volume, and, from her point of view, the too well-joined regime of psychopharmacology.  A proud suburbanite from those parts of west St. Louis County that matriculate to Parkway West High School and beyond, Washington University (MA English Literature and American Culture Studies), and beyond the beyond, University of Missouri-St. Louis (where she's studying philosophy), Darling repudiates literary culture's come-lately gatekeepers-the publishing houses-by joining the ranks of the self-published, the digitally mediated sub-culture of the web distributed authors who bring variety and fearlessness into the literary culture at large. As she has said: "With the popularization of e-books, self-publishing, chapbooks, and D.I.Y. publication, I see the privileged role of editor being increasingly democratized, thus allowing a greater range of voices to be represented in any given person's library."

Darling is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Night Songs (Gold Wake Press, 2010) and Compendium (Cow Heavy Books, 2010). She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as scholarships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Colgate Writers Conference. Her editorial projects include an anthology, narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers (VOX Press, 2011), and a volume of critical essays forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Press. To read samples of her work, click here.

As you might guess from Anti- , the title of the online journal that he edits, Steven Schroeder is the poet of the counterpunch.  Irreverent, insightful, funny, keenly aware of our culture's contradictions.  To do this well, of course, one has first to be a good reader, both of the literary tradition and of culture.  Schroeder is.  The proof is in the poems. 

 "In Touched Verse Ends," writes Richard Newman, the editor of River Styx, "Steven Schroeder pulls poetry out of its too-small boxes and scatters it all over the room.  One poem imitates form, the next mocks mental health surveys, and the herky-jerky music mixes high diction and slang, pop culture and wordplay, solemn hymns to nature and geeky robotic laws."  But for all their range and punch, these poems are not about battering or bewildering the reader.  They are playful; they are smart; they offer pleasure; and they accord respect.  They invite us to pay attention to our cultural rituals and routines that too often go unexamined.  The best seek to keep us from the fate of the video-gamers of the poem "Deathmatch Mode" where "Everyone murders and rises and dies, / and no one says or even knows / what life is like after they lose." 

Schroeder's first book of poetry, Torched Verse Ends, appeared in 2009 from BlazeVOX [books]. His poems are available or forthcoming from New England Review, Pleiades, Verse, The Journal, Indiana Review, and Verse Daily. Besides editing the online poetry journal Anti-, he serves as a contributing editor for River Styx, and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer. To read some of his work, click here.

Eileen G'Sell is an adventurer. Last summer, as World Cup fever gripped the globe, she traveled solo across South America, celebrating soccer matches with locals in cities across the continent. She surfed couch to couch, working her way slowly from one adventure to the next. 

G'Sell's poems exhibit a similar sense of adventure. They are surprising and vigorous, full of unexpected turns and language rich enough to make a meal of. They are witty and nimble and, even when they spin the reader dizzy, they are self-assured in every move. "If I had the money, I'd travel like that every summer," G'Sell said of her South America trip. Instead, she travels like that in every poem.

Born in St. Louis, G'Sell has lived in Scotland, Japan, Germany, New York, and California. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as the Boston Review, Harp & Altar, Super Arrow, Ninth Letter, Conduit, Interim, and Zone 3. She received an MA from the University of Rochester in 2003 and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006, where she currently teaches English and serves as assistant editor of publications at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. In 2010 she launched a bi-monthly reading and creative writing program at the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club of St. Louis. You can read some of G'Sell's work in Inknode, the Boston Review, and Verse Daily.