Source of Lit - Unsaid - Brian Kubarycz

Brian Kubarycz - Six Pieces:

These six pieces run the full gamut, don't they?  One page stories, a longer short story, a couple of poems.  There were two things that continued to jump out at me - his brief inclusions of Christian references, and his vocabulary, which had me thinking in terms of writing from long ago.  Specifically this second point, usage of words or phrases like:

"Crouching on shore, my skin now rubicon, on came the nights.  Space compacted me, the compass shrank down to a pit of iron ice;" ("Puerto del Sol")

"The very book of death has no horn but doth rise up, vermiform, eyeless." ("Auspex")

"Superintending the edge of this world, waiting for veined temples to descend, I plunge into the wreckage and I search for my lost kind." ("Kuklops")

Is there something specific about the writing of Kubarycz that grabs your attention, or is it perhaps a combination of various aspects?

David:

 

You're a close reader, Dan. Any allusion to Christianity in Kubarycz's work is no mistake. Specifically, any allusion to Mormonism, as Kubarycz was raised a Latter-Day Saint who now teaches at the University of Utah.  But know this: Kubarycz is no saint, Latter-Day or otherwise. The mind of his heart is too openly independent to be that of a saint. He sees too clearly to let his way of seeing be compromised by external dogma. He's the one the saints might envy and weep for simultaneously.

Let me share a quote from Harold Bloom's book, The American Religion: "A major American poet, perhaps one called a Gentile by the Latter-Day Saints, some time in the future will write their early story as the epic it was." Well, Mr. Bloom is an extremely smart man who sometimes offers his readers some far-fetched notions, but I agree with this statement, and to a certain extent I believe that Brian Kubarycz is the poet he speaks of. 

Kubarycz may never write the epic foreseen by Bloom, but already he has written what one might call an authenticated Mormon mythology. Kubarycz bears witness unflinchingly. He takes the stance of a Mormon who is no longer a believer, and gives us writing I believe could not be written by anyone raised otherwise. I also believe his pages could not have been written by a Mormon who remained loyal to the fold.

Kubarycz's content is one of insightful religious contention. Lingually, he presents many discernibly subtle moments. Here is a sentence from "On the Mountain", the first story he ever submitted to me for Unsaid: 

"He needed leaving for a while under the house until the sun got to him even under there and we began to feel the stink coming up from under the rug my mother might have beaten into cleanness."

Clearly--by anyone's standards--this is a beautifully wrought sentence. But it's the phrase "beaten into cleanness" that hit me hardest and continues to hit me each time I read it. This assemblage of three words sums up the Mormon legacy as clearly as the whole of Bloom's tome. The history of the Mormons is stained by violence under a veneer of cleanliness. Kubarycz nails it. "On the Mountain" is as good a story as I have ever read. Even without knowledge of its backdrop, any attentive reader will measure it as a great accomplishment in American Literature. 

This stands true for all of Kubarycz's work. I've had the great pleasure of reading his unpublished collection, tentatively entitled, The Instruments I Used. It disconcerts me to no end that the publishers of Cormac McCarthy's work responded to Kubarycz's pages by saying they are "too literary for the current market." Regardless, Kubarycz is making his mark, and I have no doubt that his pages will be praised by both the public and the likes of Bloom before the final sun sets.