Kirjahaku

When Tracy's brother Aaron commits suicide, she inherits his dogs: two dog-aggressive pit bulls and the French mastiff Stella. As Tracy navigates her grief, she also has to learn how to care for her new dogs - who come with issues of their own. The dogs provide independent Tracy with ready-made fences, and necessitate new relationships with others exploring their own memories, fractured families and mental health issues. Life in the small Wisconsin town is a fishbowl of sorts, but also a place where pain is private - oblique and whispered.For anyone who has loved a dog, for anyone who has tried to navigate the class distinctions of small-town America, for anyone who has tried to balance the expectations of who the world says they should be with their own unruly desires, This Business of the Flesh speaks to the families & friendships we make out of our pasts.

Abjectification mines our most intimate moments to flesh out the horrors of human interaction. In the isolated system of these stories, the past is animate and tangible, located in the body, fantasy & nightmare intertwined.Like matter, what we've loved isn't destroyed, it merely changes forms. A man thinks he's found a haven from the past with a new love in "Freak Show"; Meghan seems sensitive to exposure, but she isn't the woman Jeff imagines he's been sleeping with at all. A small family begins remodeling their home in "Shedding," but their six-year-old daughter Emmy discovers unsettling things in the walls. In "Hand-Me-Down," Carly Jo welcomes her high school boyfriend back into her life after he moves home to care for his dying mother; she's haunted by the mother's presence in their lives and in their bed. Old friends reconnect, disregarding "Boundaries," only to discover a force is whittling the group down, their new spouses and partners in lethal danger. Kubasta's collection is creepy, haunting, and unapologetically sexy.

Abjectification mines our most intimate moments to flesh out the horrors of human interaction. In the isolated system of these stories, the past is animate and tangible, located in the body, fantasy & nightmare intertwined.Like matter, what we've loved isn't destroyed, it merely changes forms. A man thinks he's found a haven from the past with a new love in "Freak Show"; Meghan seems sensitive to exposure, but she isn't the woman Jeff imagines he's been sleeping with at all. A small family begins remodeling their home in "Shedding," but their six-year-old daughter Emmy discovers unsettling things in the walls. In "Hand-Me-Down," Carly Jo welcomes her high school boyfriend back into her life after he moves home to care for his dying mother; she's haunted by the mother's presence in their lives and in their bed. Old friends reconnect, disregarding "Boundaries," only to discover a force is whittling the group down, their new spouses and partners in lethal danger. Kubasta's collection is creepy, haunting, and unapologetically sexy.

"'You never told me about that, ' Mom said, 'but I think a lot of things happened at Mollie's I didn't know about...' and she smiled. Kate thought about the skinny-dipping, but also finding Uncle RJ's magazines, and kissing Mollie's brother--the one who got married tonight."Girls at home, with their sometimes cruel and sometimes protective families, girls in other girls' homes, seeing everything. Girls watching boys, girls in the woods, girls in fairy tales, and girls handled roughly, like disposable kittens in a sack for drowning. C. Kubasta imagines all the girls through the lens of two friends hurtling toward womanhood, as they crash into and orbit around men and each other--trying to snatch from life their own terrifying hopes and desires. Girling takes the reader into the magic and secret space that exists in the whispers between two girls, equally best friends and rivals. In direct, engaging prose, Kubasta locates the girl who women forget and men erase in a coming-of-age story that peels away the distortion and hazy memories that protect women from understanding their own power and hubris. This is an engaging fiction debut that exposes the heart and blood of small town BFFs as an unexpectedly sophisticated, fast-paced girlhood rife with fragile innocence, visceral experiences, and self-awareness.

In Under the Tented Skin, Kubasta weaves together folklore, mythology, and the peculiar allure of sideshows to explore themes of identity, sexuality, and the body's inescapable marks of trauma. From Medusa's defiant power to Topsy the elephant's tragic tale, Kubasta's poems reflect on her journey from rural girlhood to womanhood, grappling with the complexities of being childless by choice, desiring love, and longing for self-reparenting. Through intimate reflections, she challenges us to embrace the raw and the essential, blending the mythical with the mundane in a world where trust and bodies are fragile, yet powerful.