Description
Poetry. "C. Kubasta's ALL BEAUTIFUL & USELESS is a fearless book. With an amazing range of forms—including sonnets, erasures and a screenplay—these poems ask us to investigate "the sudden violence/done to childhood when you trust too much." Poems about the Salem Witch Trials, Thumbelina, Cinderella, the victims of serial killer Ed Gein, as well as poems from the poet's own experience explore the devastating violence that is so often inflicted on female bodies. These poems demand our attention. A remarkable debut collection."—Nicole Cooley
"From a fresh consideration of the Salem witch trials, C. Kubasta's ALL BEAUTIFUL & USELESS launches into autobiography rendered in a masterful array of forms, voices, and rhythms. Re-constructed delivery methods such as sonnets, personal lyrics, and a playlet blend with incorporations of Big Government's strategic redactions, computer code, academic lingo, and Modernist explorations of the line to produce a book improbably personal and deeply moving. This book knocks me flat."—Mike Smith, author of Multiverse
"In this striking and incisive collection, Kubasta wants to "know what is used—what is wasted," even though knowing can't resurrect or heal. ALL BEAUTIFUL & USELESS is built on such scars, but also on "old encyclopedias, hopelessly / out of date, yet true." Bared and bearing it, Kubasta carries us through memory and erudition to a garage packed with what makes us human. She opens the boxes because she must. Inside is one honest song. It's this book."—Dan Rosenberg
"I have long admired Kubasta's exploratory combination of citation, history, and autobiography in her texts. Her work is always exciting, sometimes even alarming. In her poems using the metaphor of the box, I'm reminded of Joseph Cornell, of course, but also of the great Serbian poet Vasko Popa. The reader doesn't know whether he/she is outside looking in or inside looking out, but one certainly remembers that Yeats said that a good poem should snap shut—like a box—and hopes for the best."—John Matthias
Author Bio
C. Kubasta experiments with hybrid forms, excerpted text, and shifting voices—her work has been called claustrophobic and unflinching. Her favorite rejection (so far) noted that one editor loved her work, and the other hated it. A Lovely Box (Finishing Line Press, 2013) won the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Prize. Her poetry has appeared in So To Speak, Stand, The Notre Dame Review, Tinderbox Poetry Review, and Lemon Hound, among other places, and she writes a regular column for The Rain, Party & Disaster Society on teaching, writing and reading. ALL BEAUTIFUL & USELESS (BlazeVOX, 2015) is her first book. She writes, teaches and lives in Wisconsin with her beloved John, geriatric cat Cliff and St. Bernard-mix Ursula.
Author City: BUFFALO, NY USA