"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."--Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Half of the World in Light"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."--Maurya Simon, author of Cartographies"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."--Thomas Lux, author of God ParticlesKate 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, The Ravenous Audience 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!
