Speaking Parts

"Remarkable actress and dazzling poet Beth Ruscio knows both the many masks we wear and those singular performances we each live to give. In SPEAKING PARTS, her powerful and deeply moving new collection of poems, we become the audience to the self and its many faces, some public and some familial, some romantic, yet some hidden until, at last, they are suddenly revealed. The elegant enactments and lyrical mediations of Speaking Parts remind us that to speak for others also allows us to speak most eloquently for those many interior aspects of ourselves. In this inventive and precisely staged book of poetry, those disparate voices braid together into a single luminous choir."

-David St. John, author of THE AURORAS

"Buoying us fearlessly through theatrical make-up sessions, costume changes, death, love, and itchy wigs, the luminous poems in Beth Ruscio's debut collection SPEAKING PARTS speak to us in a language that's inviting, insightful, and alive. Even while acknowledging that 'sorrow bleaches us, ' and observing that there's a 'grammar of danger in the color if ice, ' these poems somehow always uplift. Confident and poised, they own the stage of these pages. I am on my feet, applauding them and their maker."

-Gail Wronsky, author of IMPERFECT PASTORALS

"Reading SPEAKING PARTS, I'm reminded of Marlon Brando's response to the praise lavished on his (arguably spectacular) acting skills: 'Everybody acts, ' he'd shrug. Precisely! In Beth Ruscio's ingenious, turn-on-a-dime poems, performance is all. There is no 'true' self for her speaker to uncover, and no canned epiphanies for readers, either. There are only the unsparing imperatives of improvisation-timing, cunning, abandon, ruse. Each moment's desire met and then deflected. What does it take to play our/selves? Everything."

-Dorothy Barresi, author of WHAT WE DID WHILE WE MADE MORE GUNS

Beth Ruscio, daughter of actors, is part of a working class family of artists, actors, teachers and writers working in California. Her poetry has been Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated and won finalist honors for several prizes and awards: The Wilder Prize, The Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, The Tupelo Quarterly Prize, The Ruth Stone Poetry Award and The Two Sylvias Prize. She was the second prize winner in Beyond Baroque's Best Poem Contest, was named a Newer Poet by Los Angeles Poetry Festival and won the Patricia Bibby Scholarship to Idyllwild Poetry awarded by Cecilia Woloch. SPEAKING PARTS, her first full-length collection, won the Brick Road Poetry Prize. A featured poet and frequent contributor to CATHEXIS NORTHWEST PRESS, as well as CULTURAL WEEKLY, other recent work has been published in TUPELO QUARTERLY, TULANE REVIEW, SPILLWAY, MALPAIS REVIEW, HIGH SHELF, and is forthcoming in APEIRON REVIEW. Her poems also appear in the anthologies DARK INK: POETRY INSPIRED BY HORROR; BEYOND THE LYRIC MOMENT; 1001 NIGHTS; and CONDUCTING A LIFE: MARIA IRENE FORNES. Ruscio is also an accomplished, award-winning film, television and theatre actress, and a longtime mentor at Otis College of Art and Design. She shares her life with her husband, the gifted playwright and teacher Leon Martell and their talented dog Lolita. Discover more: please visit her website at bethruscio.com.