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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.

Carole Maso is the author of ten books: Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, AVA, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Defiance, Aureole, Break Every Rule, The Room Lit by Roses, Beauty Is Convulsive, and Mother & Child. She has received numerous awards, including the Berlin Prize and the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. Maso is currently a professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.