Carole Maso

Beauty is Convulsive

The Passion of Frida Kahlo

"Maso's incantatory description of her conjured–up subject's embrace takes on extraordinary power . . . Like Frida Kahlo's painting—impossible to look away from." —Kai Maristed, Los Angeles Times

At the age of eighteen, Frida Kahlo’s life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced through by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self–portraits.

A vibrant series of prose poems, Beauty Is Convulsive is a passionate meditation on Frida Kahlo, one of the twentieth century’s most compelling artists. Carole Maso brings together pieces from Kahlo’s biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries to assemble a text that is as erotic, mysterious, and colorful as one of Kahlo’s paintings.

Ghost Dance

A Novel

"Although author Carole Maso follows the contours of fiction, style is everything in Ghost Dance, a strangely lovely and perplexing book . . . she has a fine ear and her literary gift is impressive." —San Francisco Chronicle

Originally published in 1986, Ghost Dance is the first in a line of relentlessly experimental and highly esteemed works by Carole Maso.

Vanessa Turin's family has been broken up by an event so devastating she cannot bear to face it straight on. Her mother, the brilliant and beautiful poet Christine Wing, seems simply to have disappeared, and her gentle, silent father also vanishes. In Ghost Dance, the reader experiences firsthand the dimensions of Vanessa's longing, the capabilities of her imagination, the persistence of her memory, and the ferocity of her love as she struggles to retrieve her family, to reclaim her country, and to come to terms with overwhelming sorrow.

Room Lit By Roses

From one of our most daring writers comes this intimate and seductive book: a working journal of pregnancy that was both a Lambda Literary Awards finalist and a Village Voice pick for Best Books of 2000. Maso chronicles with great tenderness and awe the months of her pregnancy, from its charmed conception through the auspicious arrival of Rose.

Mother and Child

A Novel

A literary mediation on life and death, being and non–being, and the intense mystery and beauty of existence between a mother and child.

“Heartbreakingly perfect” (San Francisco Chronicle), Maso’s moving, dreamlike novel follows a mother and child as they roam through wondrous and increasingly dangerous psychic and physical terrain. A great wind comes, an ancient tree splits in half, and a bat, or possibly an angel, enters the house where the mother and child sleep, and in an instant a world of relentless change, of spectacular consequences, of submerged memory, and uncanny intimations is set into motion. What was once hidden is now in plain sight in all its splendor and terror as the mother and child are asked to bear enormous transformations and a terrible wisdom almost impossible to fathom. As the outside can no longer be separated from the inside, nor dream from reality, the mother and child continue, encountering along the way all kinds of characters and creatures as they move through a surreal world of grace and dread to the end.

“The tough–mindedness, originality and wit of her perceptions are intoxicating.”—Publisher Weekly

“By giving the conflicts in her life a fictional context, she tries to bring order and beauty—and some degree of understanding—to chaos.”—Library Journal

“Fully coherent, moving and elegiac, a genuine consolation.” —The New York Times Book Review