"The speakers in Monica Ferrell's You Darling Thing are so effusively unreliable the experience of reading her poems is like walking through a cosmos of brilliant women describing themselves in exaggerated bravura even when danger looms. 'I feel the feral marble machine of my heart leak mercury,' says the Tourist Bride, who is only one of many variations of bride that populate this noir collection filled with persona poems spoken in the voice of Emma Bovary, a tiger 'abandoned at the hunt's end,' and a fifteenth-century Italian princess who died in childbirth, among others. Ferrell's poems are a force field of anachronism, lush irony, and an almost self-denying violent wit fueled by juxtaposition. Though the men in this collection are often dangerous, their blue eyes 'malevolent as the circles of gas on a stove, as the blue kiss on the matchstick / That drags a house down,' these are poems investigating love, where love is vexed, elusive, threatened by violence. 'Love is a currency everyone wants,' writes Ferrell, and we watch the shady transactions with guilty pleasure. Despite the eros and the sensuality in these gorgeous otherworldly poems, human touch is still a distant country and 'what you so often think / Belongs to you does not belong to you at all.' Brides and grooms in all their ventriloquy speak to and past each other while 'Desire keeps rippling their transparent skin.'".