Hart's is a poetry of pain and faith, describing prisons of disability through which sudden flashes of beauty and even glory shine. The individuals who populate these poems share their troubled or eccentric visions in such a way to individualize them at the same time that they meld with the speaker to become a single perception. The poems leap from a base of Texas to places all over the world where artists, poets, musicians, architects, and inventors have struggled to understand the parameters of their world. A Cut-and-Paste Country is both heartbreaking and heart-lifting - strong, passionate work."" -Janet McCann, Series Editor, author of Looking for Buddha in the Barbed-Wire Garden and Emily's Dress.""A Cut-and-Paste Country is a journey through time and place with a considerable cast of intriguing historical characters - inventors, architects, artists, visionaries - whom Kate Hart talks about and through. In these fascinating poems, Hart considers the power of imagination and the many ways life ""constantly reinvents itself."" With Hart as a conductor, we navigate the journey from past to present to future, enchanted by the long, low blow of a distant train that is sure to take us to fascinating new environs."" - Anne McCrady, Author of Along Greathouse Road and Letting Myself In""Kathleen Hart's voice is marvelously Catholic, delivers the broken beauty that we are: in our gifts, in our vulnerability, in our woundedness. There's an admirable humility in these poems. Her ego never seems to get in the way as she delivers the cross, both its pain and its glory. I felt like Bartleby after reading these finely crafted poems: ""Oh, the humanity!"" -David Craig, Series Editor, author of St. Francis Poems and Whose Saints We Are
