All Beautiful & Useless

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, author of Breach

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 and Byron in Baghdad

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 All Beautiful & Useless is built on such scars, but also on “old encyclopedias, hopelessly / out of date, yet true.”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, author of cadabra

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