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    Of Covenants
    Of Covenants
    Of Covenants
    Ebook94 pages39 minutes

    Of Covenants

    By C. Kubasta

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The earnest voice misspeaks, as does the speaker of these poems—often. All things made of language "are interactive objects discolored by the touch of people's hands." Of Covenants considers the ways we name and structure experience, creating contracts through our legal, religious, and linguistic systems until we are caught in a web of shifting signification, a system in which we "submit to consensus" but "did not participate in the building of this consensus."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWhitepoint Press
    Release dateDec 9, 2017
    ISBN9781944856137
    Of Covenants
    Author

    C. Kubasta

    Originally from Wautoma, a small town in central Wisconsin, C. Kubasta graduated from Wells College, when it was still a women's college, and the University of Notre Dame with an MFA in Creative Writing. She is the author of several chapbooks, the poetry collection All Beautiful & Useless, and the novella Girling. She lives, teaches, and writes in Wisconsin where she is often inspired by the rural, the bodies we inhabit, the subtexts of relationships & our selves.

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    Reviews for Of Covenants

    3.5/5

    15 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I liked it and I think it neat how it was formatted on the page. I thought her poems were interesting. If she comes out with another collection I will probably check it out.
    • 5/5
      Kubasta has written a dense, sometimes inaccessible little volume of "poetry," flipping our definition of the phrase "free-form verse" on its head. Like music, Kubasta samples phrases or ideas from other sources, but still makes the words her own, or at least the thought and messages she is trying to convey. Legal and scientific jargon mix with emotional outpouring, as if the two hemispheres of her brain were fighting for the page.Page placement is another interesting aspect of the book. I don't think the words and their location are happenstance, I would love to hear the thought process about filling some pages with paragraphs, while others feature a cube of letters or a small verse."Of Covenants" is unorthodox and deep, but never dry or boring. Reading it feels like stumbling upon the secret diary or journal of a stranger, accidentally getting into the writer's head, and seeing mutual feelings and confessions that the reader could have come up with. Very impressive.
    • 4/5
      Kubasta fills Of Covenants with pithy statements about actions in the world, mixed with comments about speech, language, and natural law. This is ambitious stuff and it is beyond me to completely understand the whole or follow its structure even though I admire many parts.Like much contemporary poetry, the references are many and varied and often private and unaccessible. The four appendices may be helpful, or they may be poems themselves; I can only guess.But this work keeps me reading. I blame myself, not the poet, for my failures to understand. Everywhere I find crystal statements, as in "This Fall and Its Signifiers," where I find: "In the night, her feet shed their socks./...She stays awake to enjoy her pink-winter-skin."
    • 3/5
      It is hard to review poetry like Kubasta wrote. One day I read a poem and love it. The next day I don't. This is the power of the authors work. It feels forced often and fluid at other times. It is a work of art that begs to be looked at.
    • 4/5
      I found much of this difficult to understand and relate to (probably a fault of youthful inexperience), but there were definitely some segments that were powerful and made me think about topics in new ways. I was particularly struck by Kubasta's treatment of salt and sand and their uses, strengths, and weaknesses, although my favorite was probably The Covenant of User Agreements. I generally prefer metered poetry, but there were parts of Of Covenants that I was able to appreciate and enjoy.

    Book preview

    Of Covenants - C. Kubasta

    Praise for Of Covenants

    C. Kubasta, please don’t take offense as we make reference to, ahem, country music in reviewing your fantastic new collection, Of Covenants. The plainspoken, country-road cadence and homespun themes lean to AM, not FM, and yet the words, sounds, and rhythms are high-beam, A-team poetry.

    —Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews

    That Kubasta’s poems break the contracts they make—stealing instead of citing source material, for instance—is, as Eliot might quip, pure genius! Tradition, move over and make room for a brilliant new talent.

    —Cynthia Hogue, author of Revenance

    The poems are experienced; they are in fact assemblages of experience; of autobiography, of research, of citation—or the effacement of such accounting, and thereby reminds us that every memory is also a system of forgetting. Every confession a potential excuse.

    —Jeffrey Pethybridge, author of Striven, The Bright Treatise

    ***

    Of Covenants

    poems

    C. Kubasta

    Whitepoint Press

    San Pedro, California

    ***

    Copyright © 2017 by C. Kubasta

    All rights reserved.

    Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:

    editors@whitepointpress.com

    Whitepoint Press First Edition 2017

    Cover by Mollie Oblinger

    ISBN - 978-1-944856-13-7

    Published by Whitepoint Press

    Distributed by Smashwords

    ***

    For Dylan & Ethan, who helped their bookish aunt finish these poems—

    ***

    CONTENTS

    Interactive Objects

    Language as Legislating Fabric

    [Sand requires the interstitial]

    Central Dogmas

    Broken Sonnet: Being born a woman

    Architecture

    The Fire

    Folly

    Eco called Love A Devastating Unhappy Happiness

    Marriage

    Scattering [Remix]

    Dreamscape: Such Wealth Brings

    Lattice

    The Map

    The Poet & The Thylacine

    Correspondences

    Trafficking in Books

    The Covenants

    The Covenant of Irrigation

    The Central Sands

    The Covenant of Language

    The Uses of Salt

    The Covenant of Topiramate

    The Covenant of the Pangolin

    The (Mis)uses of Salt

    The Covenant of Puncture Wounds

    The Covenant of Mouths

    The Covenant of Traffic Laws

    Beneath Lies What

    The Covenant of User Agreements

    Antecedents

    The Covenant of Pronouns

    Autumn Song

    The Mutable Us

    No Lonely Tree; The Problem with Natural Imagery

    Love is Mostly Obligation, Like Breathing

    [It outlasts]

    Autumn Song (II)

    A Plenty of Fish Profile if You Were Rachel Harrison

    Broken so Beloved

    Scene One: Minneapolis, Minnesota, April, a Conference Room with Too-Patterned Carpeting

    Scene Two: Aarhus, Denmark, December, before Lunch and the Afternoon Sessions

    Scene Three: Any 7th Grade Language Arts Classroom, when the Blackboards are still Green

    Them & Us & We

    This Fall & Its Signifiers

    A Mercy

    Appendix A

    Appendix B

    Appendix C

    Appendix D

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    ***

    Interactive Objects

    Both place-based and place-less, these are poems of great disloyalty. These are interactive objects discolored by the touch of people’s hands.

    It is time to look at the concentric rings of once-whole wood. Here is the drought that starved us out. Here, the fire that barely killed us.

    We contract the disease that killed him — remember which salad dressing to order, but not the man we cherished like a vow.

    ***

    Language as Legislating Fabric

    To sense the composite nature of frames of reference, think of their incidental aftermath, think

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