To create a wedding registry is to participate in a commercially scripted sort of magical thinking: If I have this ergonomically designed dish rack, if these ramekins are matched and lined up in my cupboards, if these Egyptian cotton bed sheets cocoon us, if this blender, this juicer – then our lives will be perfect ever after. To receive a wedding registry is to feel oddly pressured, not only to buy, but to buy the correct thing: symbolically appropriate, affordable, but not too cheap. They’ve put a fancy trashcan on here. If I buy the trashcan, am I saying their love is trash? If I buy one place setting am I dooming them to sharing the same plate, night after night? They put a COUCH on here? One might feel slight resentment buying domestic items for a couple that already live together and clearly have their needs met (Towels? They don’t even need towels. They have towels. They are towel greedy.), and one might feel uneasy that others you love who are gay are denied their marriage in many states. And what about those people who are perfectly happy unmarried, whether partnered or solo? No one buys them a Cuisinart.
All of this is to say that the wedding registry is a document of immense cultural and emotional freight, and the items on it laden with symbolic meaning. It’s this heavy subject that Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess deftly examine in X Marks the Dress: A Registry, highlighting the gulf between the pageantry of a wedding, and the more mundane roles we eventually inhabit. Guess and Darling divide their book of prose poems into four sections: an untitled narrative series wherein each poem is named after registry items; Appendix A: Marginalia and Other Fragments: footnotes to missing text, endnotes and glossaries to another missing text, “A History of Wedding Invitations”; “Appendix B: Dictionary of Nuptial Slang,” a humorous set of poems titled after the externals of a relationship: his-and-hers, ledgers, decorative pillows; “Appendix C: What Survived the House fire,” an erasure of the poems in the first section.
If that sounds like a diverse lot, you’re not wrong, but the collection coheres through its consistent thematic concerns and frequent allusions to and re-castings of imagery from the first section’s loose narrative. The effect is like watching a movie and then watching a documentary about its creation.
Throughout the book, Guess and Darling dissect the cultural reification of marriage through wedding registries and ceremonies to poignant effect. These are poems of foreboding and doom, glimpsed through quick and fleeting images of calamity, as in “Crocheted Tissue Box Holder,” which begins with the line, “Sometimes things go wrong at weddings” and rapidly escalates from minor misfortunes (“Someone steps on the veil or loses the ring”) to major disaster: “In a “trash the dress” shoot on the bank of a river, one bride lost her footing, dead weight in her dress.“ In other poems, the beloved disappears after the toast, car keys are locked in kitchen cabinets, and no one gets what they want.
Many of the poems concern gender identity and its performance. In the book’s first section, each poem is in the voice of one member of an uneasy triumvirate: a bride, the husband, and the husband’s mistress. This potentially familiar setup is turned on its head as the series progresses, revealing that the husband is transgender. Just as Darling and Guess approach marriage via its expected objects (colander, ice cream scoops, knife block), they use material items to hint at the husband’s double life, such as hidden stilettos, jewelry, and lingerie.
Likewise, external trappings denote the bride’s femininity – there are repeated references to her wedding dress, pink scented paper, as well as stilettos. These markers of feminine identity are often concurrent with images of entrapment or incarceration, as in these lines from “{Champagne Flutes}”: “Before long you’ll fasten me to a satin pillow. I’ll see my car keys locked in your kitchen cabinet.” The phrase “ice queen” never appears but feels unspoken throughout, as in these lines from {Ice Cream Scoop}: “But I’m such a slow learner, the ice on my dress never seems to thaw: pale hands, cold silk, every ribbon frozen in place.” Her muted emotional and sexual life sharply contrasts with the brief glimpses of the husband and mistresses’ lusty practices: “the knots you beg for, bending over.” When the bride attempts seduction, she can’t seem to decouple it from traditional female roles, presenting a sadly humorous update on June Cleaver’s vacuuming in heels in the poem “{Silver Platter}”: “I’ve been cleaning the kitchen cabinets in my Sunday best: pencil skirt, black leather boots, & just enough perfume.” Though the bride can at times seems helpless and static, Darling and Guess’s poems are self-aware, tipping their hat to the trope in a poem from one of the many appendices to the main narrative, “An Index of Illustrations”: “it had become commonplace to depict her fragile body as a small bird under lock and key.”
It’s important to note that feminine accouterments aren’t portrayed as inherently negative. For the transgendered husband, openly wearing these signifiers is to embrace her true identity as a woman. In the penultimate poem of the series, “Personalized Luggage Tag,” the husband boards a ship with “Flowers in my hair, white scar, pink nails: no looking back.” In doing so, she breaks free of the name Albert, to take up a new name and new identity. The tone is one of excitement and release, as in the lines:
Here’s salt on a glass the color of sunset, here’s a toast to lost luggage and one-way fare. History begins with the future, perfect. I re-apply lipstick behind door number 2.
Despite these serious concerns, X Marks the Dress: A Registry is not without light moments, and many of the poems in Appendix B: Dictionary of Nuptial Slang will make you laugh out loud at their absurdism. “Labor Day Sale” is a humorous literalization of the phrase “ball and chain.” The poem, “Pizza” suggests an unusual and surreal tactic for dealing with unaccepting parents. But even in these lighter moments, Darling and Guess still have bite. In the poem, “Unworn Garter,” an offbeat bride decides on an unusual garter, “a tattoo that looked exactly like a satin garter. When the time came he knelt and she lifted. He scraped at her thigh while she gritted her teeth.” It’s hard to imagine a more fraught image of two people at cross-purposes. X Marks the Dress: A Registry is just as offbeat, offering a little that is old, borrowed, and blue, with plenty that is new.
