Foreword Reviews:
“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.” Read the entire review here.
—Matt Sutherland
Advance Praise
“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
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“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 system is also a system of forgetting. Every confession, a potential excuse.”
—Jeffrey Pethybridge, author of Striven, The Bright Treatise
LibraryThing & Goodreads Reviews
“In Of Covenants, Kubasta digs into the deep roots of the English language to draw the reader into thought provoking written word. This book of poetry left me with the need to read through it a number of times if only to catch all the nuance. I’m quite sure I’m still missing things. Of Covenants made me sit down and really think about what was written. It was edgy and mysterious in all the right places, eventually drawing me in and making me consider a different perspective. My only issue would be that it was difficult for me to connect with and get into at the beginning, likely due to a lack of understanding at the start. I am not ashamed to admit that I found a need for a dictionary at times where context clues could not help me understand. Over all it was an interesting read and I would certainly recommend it to my more poetry inclined friends.”
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“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 inaccessible. 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.'”
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