The Beautifully Worthless

by Ali Liebegott

Book Overview

Winner of the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction.

"The Beautifully Worthless is an outrageous act of kindness."--Eileen Myles

"She's insanely talented, it's mad. The Beautifully Worthless crisscrosses the USA, like Close to the Knives, like Kerouac, desperately seeking out everything occluded and driven, a frenzy of seeking frozen into poetry."--Kevin Killian

"Ali Liebegott's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872865711
• ISBN13: 9780872865716
• Release Date: April 2013
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful

I may never speak ill of poetry again. Because this collection flows so well as a whole work, it seems wrong to mention individual pieces. It is, sort of, a story about a run away waitress and her dog. It may sum up to that, but each piece is an entirely different country. One entry in particular has a strong grip on my memory because it touches on a story that resurfaces through my life. When I was in high school, I was an avid hiker and planned to travel the southern span of the Appalachian Trail before I submitted to college. We were training for it, taking weekend hikes with fully loaded packs, breaking in boots, camping in snow, getting in shape for the long trek when our leader told us that two women had been murdered along the trail, so the trip was off. He was looking at me when he told the group. Years later, I read Bill Bryson's book about hiking the trail (and was appalled by his lack of preparation!) when he mentioned the murders. It was the first time I heard that the women were lesbians. That they were a couple. Several years after reading Bryson's book, I heard that someone was charged for those murders. I was amazed that anyone in law enforcement cared enough to keep the case open. I tried putting together those bits of information into a full story, but it was never clear what happened, or even when, and if those facts were muddled with another murder of two women on the trail that happened a different year. I never found out if the same person was charged with both sets of murders. Sometimes I wondered if there was one murder or two. Then I read Ali's words: "The women hikers were murdered for being lesbians. The sound of that drones in and out, soon I don't know what happened exactly-" And for once poetry meant something to me. Something personal. It was a BAM! between the eyes moment of connection for me. I didn't have to diagram her words to know what they meant. As I read through this incredible work, I was turning down page corners so that I knew where to go back and read again (Death. Love. About her dog.) but had to stop because almost every corner was bent. There's so much to be found in her words. I'm crushing on this book. I'm starting over from page one. Share the infatuation. Get a copy.

Yes, Ali, There is a Camus

Ali Liebegott's new collection of poetry, The Beautifully Worthless, is a stunning debut. Fresh out of the gate from the wizards at Suspect Thoughts Press in San Francisco, this remarkable gem is a fresh and fantastic look at life in all its complexity, ugliness and beauty. Liebegott's work delivers a powerful wallop in few words and is almost a collection of epigrams that both saddens and inspires. My copy is filled with notations in the margins for future reference. Similar to Neruda in its earthiness, Tess Gallagher in its honesty, and Michelle Tea in ingenuity and style, TBW will make a great gift this year for friends who have grown tired of wordy or self-conscious poetry. Liebegott explores feelings of desperate yearning for a better place in "Jackpot, Nevada": "I don't know much about leaving town just that the wooden handle that pumps that well keeps going up and down inside of me" She also fully understands the power of words in "Years Later: Montrose, Pennsylvania" with, "I wanted to be the weightless gun hidden/inside the typewriter, smuggled to the inmate." From describing her complicated relationship with her mother in "Las Vegas" ("When we fell, we fell, two suitcases/side by side from the bridge") to the painful deterioration of romantic partnerships in "Brooklyn" ("downstairs we moved slowly around each other/not gorgeously, but like the yellow/that slowly overtakes the leaf's edge"), Liebegott is one of those rare poets who invites you into her reality simply because she is filled with compassion ("I know what it feels like to have nothing to lose"). And she is damn good at it.

Same Difficult World, Different Atlas

One of the recurring images in this endearing book is that of the penny--worthless (practically), yet impossible to just ignore or throw away. So it is with the footloose narrator, who refuses to live a throw-away life, in spite of herself. Comparisons to Adrienne Rich's poem, "An Atlas of the Difficult World," are inevitable, since both works cover some of the same ground; Liebegott acknowledges such by quoting from the Rich poem. But while Liebegott shares Rich's astonishing gift for imagery, she also gives us something Rich rarely (if ever) does: humor. It has been pointed out, and bears repeating, that Liebegott can be heartbreaking one moment, funny the next. Here is a poet who is not only the real thing, but also the complete package. My only question about this book is, can it really be called a novel? I ask this, not in the spirit of carping, but because the book is rich enough to provoke some lively discussion on this topic. I hope Ali Liebegott joins in; I'm dying to hear more of her voice.

Hosanna

I remember going to see David Wojnarowicz reading from CLOSE TO THE KNIVES and thinking that never again would I experience a reading of such power and such vast seismic changes of mood and register. And until two weeks ago, I still thought so. Then I went to see Ali Liebegott and had the same kind of earthquake experience all over again. She's insanely talented, it's mad. If any of you enjoyed Anne Carson's "novel in verse," AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN RED, I imagine you will like this book too. It is coming out of the same impulse, to find the lyric heart lurking inside narrative and to display it, to glory in it, to foreground that which is ordinarily hidden. THE BEAUTIFULLY WORTHLESS criss-crosses the USA, like CLOSE TO THE KNIVES, like Kerouac, desperately seeking out everything occluded and driven, a frenzy of seeking frozen into poetry. The sequences late in this book are written in language as stately and magnificent as the Psalms (King James version). Before this reading I wasn't very aware of Ali Liebegott and now I'm like Saul after Tarsus, I've seen the light and I'm here to spread the word. Whatever we were looking for, all the basic reasons we are drawn to reading, for escape, for commitment, for pleasure, for passion, she's got them good, like fever.