The Four Ugliest Children in Christendom

About Camille-Yvette Welsch

Camille-Yvette Welsch is also the author of a chapbook, Full. A long-time Literary Mama book reviews editor, her work has appeared in Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, and others. She teaches writing at The Pennsylvania State University.

Praise for The Four Ugliest Children in Christendom

In this strange, bold collection, four “ugly” children are plucked from their homelands and cast in a makeshift family to be studied by anthropologists as they navigate toward adulthood and, against all odds, toward self-worth. At once achingly invisible in all the ways they wish to be seen and terrifyingly visible in all the ways they’d wish to disappear, The Four Ugliest Children in Christendom are ghosts we cannot look away from. While others recoil from the children’s lumpy shadows and laddered bones, their throats full of whistles, Camille-Yvette Welsch’s sharp, unwavering eye requires that we look, while challenging our judgments about appearance and acceptance on every page. Nothing is more true than ugly, these poems say. Voyeuristic yet sensitive, this book unravels a story of awakening, how a group of outsiders can cling to each other like interlocking gears and how they can break free. We will surely remain haunted long after reading.
—Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Paper-Doll Fetus and Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones

In The Four Ugliest Children in Christendom one of the characters goes to Cirque de Soleil and muses as she watches the trapeze artist: “She’d do it without the safety lines/no fear of falling.” In every one of these riveting pages, fearless Camille-Yvette Welsch writes without the safety lines. I love this bold and scary book. And I love these kids— ugly like I’m ugly and gorgeous in ways I aspire to.
—Ron Koertge, author of Sex World and Yellow Moving Van

The Four Ugliest Children in Christendom is a striking masterwork and one of the most original collections of poetry published this decade. Camille-Yvette Welsch’s horror-filled world becomes real as a nameless cast of characters forces readers to notice them. Four orphaned children are “adopted” by anthropologists as test subjects to be studied for their “ugliness.” Subject A, the eldest brother, contends: “Nothing…is more true than ugly.” This is an anthem of the work, and Welsch explores the truths and lies of these four subjects’ existence in heartbreaking fashion. She skillfully imagines this repugnant plot and holds it up as a mirror to our 21st century lives. These are siblings but not; there is incest, but not. Bodies equal worth, and shame is the wasteland the “siblings” wander. Welsch expertly sketches four portraits who emit their own animal sounds of “rage”—who ice readers to the core—finally showing us who we are.
—Sandra Marchetti, author of Confluence and The Canopy