The Ravenous Audience (Black Goat)

<P><B>A startling debut volume, the latest in Chris Abani's Black Goat poetry series.</B></P>

<P>"Christianity or cuisine, cinema or sex manuals, Eros or Thanatos, Artaud or Marilyn Monroe? Marry or suture or eat all of them and you are close to Ravenous. A brutal tour de force.”<BR>

--Juan Felipe Herrera, author of <I>Half of the World in Light</I></P>

<P>“Durbin’s debut volume sizzles . . . Throughout this deeply feminist, groundbreaking collection, she employs both the elemental forces of her intellect and a vigorous intensity of startling imagery to implode or explode conventional notions of sexuality and womanhood.” <BR>

--Maurya Simon, author of <I>Cartographies</I></P>

<P>"Durbin writes first-rate traditional lyric poems, while at other times she writes poems that push the limits of the avant-garde and, most amazingly, at other times, she makes a loving marriage of the two! This is an exceptional debut by a young poet burning with talent." <BR>

--Thomas Lux, author of <I>God Particles</I></P>

<P>Kate Durbin’s debut volume is not for the weak of gut. Cum, blood, vomit, and other bodily juices slop off the page in a grotesque reanimation of history and art’s female villains and s/heroes. Unlike other feminist revisionist texts, <I>The Ravenous Audience</I> refuses to rescue the “misunderstood” bitches of our cultural past, instead viscerally imposing the scope of their bodily and existential horrors--including each woman’s culpability. Durbin even throws the reader, and the poet, into the cauldron. Complicating all easy notions of responsibility, she points the finger in every direction possible--before biting it clean off!</P>

<P>Kate Durbin is the author of a chapbook, <I>Amelia Earhart: Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator's Boot.</I> Her poems have appeared in <I>Drunken Boat, elimae, Boxcar Poetry Review,</I> and <I>The Ledge.</I> She lives in Whittier, California.</P>