Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo

- Blurb -

"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 A vibrant series of prose poems from beloved author Carole Maso is now available in paperback for the first time. Originally published in 2002, Beauty Is Convulsive is a passionate meditation on one of the twentieth century's most compelling artists, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). At the age of nineteen, 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. At twenty-one, she joined the Communist party and soon entered into a tumultuous marriage with the famous muralist Diego Rivera. Maso wrote after reading Kahlo's diary, "I was struck not only by her last images, but by the power of her language: hallucinatory, dream-ridden, desperate, tender, written at her most vulnerable and open and perhaps most furious. I wanted in some way to be close to it--that trembling, defiant, beautiful, vibrant, wholly living page." The resulting book is typical Maso--vigorous, always daring, thoroughly original. She 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.