As its title suggests, Compendium, poet Kristina Marie Darling’s second book of poetry, is a short collection of poems compiling an incomplete history. Calling the book experimental, fails to tell the whole story. For unlike some experimental poetry, that shirks narrative, abandons traditional forms, and leaves an emotional distance between reader and text, Darling toys with traditional syntax, but leaves the reader curious, hungry, longing to restore the faded portrait that she keenly leaves unfinished.