The Beautifully Worthless

by Ali Liebegott

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 books evoke a life-affirming sensation that comes from embracing the pendular. Her ability to hit the right tone is scientific, almost violent in its precision—a single word or observation, well-placed, can have a reader crying or laughing aloud."—Evan Karp, Bomb Magazine

A runaway waitress leaves her lover, grabs her dog, and hits the highway. Ali Liebegott maps her travels in a series of hilarious and heartbreaking letters to the girl she left behind, and some of the most exquisite poetry written about love, heartache, and madness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872865716
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	04/02/2013
Series:	City Lights/Sister Spit
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ali Liebegott is the author of the award-winning books The Beautifully Worthless and The IHOP Papers. In 2010 she took a train trip across America interviewing female poets for a project titled, The Heart Has Many Doors; excerpts from these interviews are posted monthly on The Believer Logger. Her novel Cha-Ching! is forthcoming from City Lights/Sister Spit. In addition, she is the founding editor at Writers Among Artists whose first publication, Faggot Dinosaur, was released in 2012.

What People are Saying About This

Michelle Tea

"Ali Liebegott is just what the world of books needs-a voice laden with serious heartbreak and total hilarity, that takes on the absurd and somber struggles life dumps in our laps with the perfect mixture of reverence and insanity. I do believe she is a genius, and The Beautifully Worthless a stunning, memorable first book"
—author of Rent Girl

Joan Larkin

"In Ali Liebegott’s America, disillusion and heartbreak, innocence and hope travel hand in hand. Love troubles the lonely landscape like a kind of wild prayer. Liebegott’s letter to the world is a true original. Her witty, compassionate voice haunts me like no other."
—author of Cold River

Eileen Myles

"Countries are made by epic poems, I mean national memories start this way. The Beautifully Worthless is a poem (or a novel) from the wide and lost country of a queer girl on the road with a dog. This girl goes everywhere, and she knows what America is all about because of her exquisite and heartbreaking vision. When this creaky Empire is over, know that someone watched it fall as she (and Rorschach) drove through and told the story. Ali Liebegott’s The Beautifully Worthless is an outrageous act of kindness."
—author of Skies and Cool for You

Editorial Reviews

"The Beautifully Worthless is a genre-smudging, American Mythos-screwing hell of a book. Never falling into the twee or succumbing to the snarky, Liebegott's wit, astuteness and assured poetics come together to create this marvel of empathy & mercy, decency & heart; it affirms the possibility that hope is tenable and that living is worth the life itself. This is an atlas for every queerly vagabond soul, a pillow book for the hopelessly heartweary."—Justin Chin

"Ali Liebegott's The Beautifully Worthless is a mixed-genre tour de force, a classic yet subverted road story, an original and fierce claim on this country, and the generator of an unusual, moving canon. It's saturated with Liebegott's signature gifts: a peerless sense of humor and a capacity to bear witness to and articulate the darkest corners of fear and despair. I stand in awe of Liebegott's talent and heart. She is one of the best we've got."—Maggie Nelson

"Her witty, compassionate voice haunts me like no other."—Joan Larkin

"Most comparisons to Jack Kerouac induce eye-rolls, but you figure that the Beatific City Lights wouldn't print such a thing unless they meant it. The Beautifully Worthless is a subverted road story about a runaway waitress who leaves her lover and hits the road with her dog. She maps her travels in letters to the girl she left behind and poetry about love and heartache."—SF Weekly

"[Liebegott] writes with grace and empathy and with a whole 'lotta' heart."—Amos Lassen

From the Publisher

"Going on the road with Liebegott is a breathtaking experience. This hybrid work--half prose, half verse--is about a queer girl who, accompanied by her cranky Dalmatian, Rorschach, flees troubled love in Brooklyn. Her destination: existential release, and perhaps emotional solace, in Camus, Idaho. There is in fact no Camus (she misread the atlas: it's Camas)--but it's the journey that matters, not the destination. Seedy motels, spooky caves, endless miles of desert, vast halls of slot machines, a crush on a sweet-natured teenage boy, a spell in a mental institution, a strained few days with her family, profound sadness and giddy wit: the physical and emotional landscape of Liebegott's odd odyssey, crisscrossing America in an earnest search for self, is truly exhilarating. The prose parts--letters written to her lover back in Brooklyn--are the narrative backbone of The Beautifully Worthless. But it's the poetry--vivid, haunting, and visceral--that elevates this debut from innovative to original, from imaginative to memorable."
—Book Marks

Richard Labonte