City Lights/Sister Spit, 152 pages, paperback, $14.95

In The Beautifully Worthless, Ali Liebegott evokes desire, sadness, and devotion using a few simple words. That’s something throngs of authors spend their careers trying to achieve without success. Liebegott’s poems and short notes/letters are intimate and raw, but they pack enough truth and emotion to push themselves straight into that mysterious corner of the brain where readers keep morsels of memorable writing.

A genre-bending tome, The Beautifully Worthless is a collection of poems, notes, and letters written on the road by a runaway waitress after she leaves her lover, grabs her dalmatian, and hits the road with no destination in mind. The waitress here is clearly Liebegott herself, and she chronicles her travels, dreams, memories, and feelings in a series of funny/profound/touching poems and letters to Lamby, the woman she left behind, and then Peter, a youngster she meets for a few minutes while visiting a cave. Put together, there are enough cohesive elements at work to make this a novella as much as a poetry book, but what matters most is the writing is heartfelt snapshot of a crucial moment in the author’s life.

Liebegott writes with unflinching candor, and that turns this collection of fragments into a captivating reading experience. The drinking, gambling, cheap motels, and feeling of aimlessness are here and serve as the background to the author’s quest. However, what makes the poetry exceptional is the way it openly deals with heartache, fear, sex, and madness. This is poetry that should be read even by people who don’t enjoy poetry.

When a book is good, it stays with you, swimming around in your brain when you’re not reading it. When a book is great, you sometimes have to stop and savor a line, read it more than once, commit something to memory. The Beautifully Worthless contains more than a few sentences that call for that pause. Short and full of clear meanings, there are gems here that make it clear why this book, now being brought back by City Lights/Sister Spit, earned Liebegott the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction. Try this one:

“Things To Say When We’ve Let Each Other Down

1. I don’t know how to change from this monster I’ve become.”

Or this:

“Last night I dreamt of a place where sadness could be ripped in half, and sickness, tied idly in knots all day.”

 Or this:

 “Once I wanted to sail down the street in a boat made of our laughter.”

In The Beautifully Worthless, running away, nights spent in a car, awful smells, hard loses at the casino, impossible love, and a frenzied quest for something unnameable add up to something that, despite it’s gritty genuineness, deserves to be called beautiful.

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Gabino Iglesias is writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth and a few other things no one will ever read. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.