The Ravenous Audience

"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 . . . This is a book that singes the fingertips."
--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 Particles

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, 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!

Intent on upsetting the reader and herself, Durbin mixes modes, sometimes within one poem. An interview with Marilyn Monroe becomes a twisted "off the record" interaction between the starlet and the poet (or is it the reader?); a silent film starring Clara Bow goes awry, transforming an auditorium of rapt moviegoers into a sea of drowned animal heads. With raw, disquieting images that evoke Sylvia Plath's, and characters and situations as varied and bizarre as Edgar Degas' ballerinas fornicating with statues of women, Pier Pasolini's polyester-wearing Jesus (or is it Lucifer?) seducing a family of church-goers, and a Hansel-hungry Gretel, Durbin has robbed from the great filmmakers, artists, folktales, and biblical myths to fashion her own series of disturbed, mixed-up worlds. Each unfolds unto more treacherous insights and inquisitions: realms where only the ravenous dare open their mouths.