C. Kubasta experiments with hybrid forms, excerpted text, and shifting voices-her work has been called claustrophobic and unflinching. Her work proceeds in fits and starts, fragments and half-heard, overheard fragments. Her favorite rejection (so far) noted that one editor loved her work, and the other hated it. Her poetry has appeared in So To Speak, Stand, The Notre Dame Review, Tinderbox Poetry Review and Lemon Hound, among other places. A Lovely Box (Finishing Line Press) won the 2014 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Prize. Her first full-length book All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX, 2015) explores the stories of the accusing girls during the Salem witch trials and growing up with the story of Ed Gein, the notorious Wisconsinite. She teaches, lives and writes in Wisconsin with her beloved John, cat Cliff, and dog Ursula.

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"'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.