KATE DURBIN and CHRIS ABANI

10/15/2009 7:30 pm
10/15/2009 8:30 pm

The Ravenous Audience (Black Goat) by Kate Durbin
The launch event for Kate Durbin's debut poetry collection, The Ravenous Audience, featuring Chris Abani, curator of the Black Goat poetry series and acclaimed author and poet.
Born in San Diego and raised in Washington, California, and Arizona, Kate Durbin is author of a chapbook, Amelia Earhart: Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator's Boot, published by Dancing Girl Press. Her poems have appeared in Drunken Boat, elimae, Boxcar Poetry Review, and The Ledge, as well as other journals. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside and lives in Whittier, California, where she is working on a novel.

Chris Abani's prose includes Song For Night (Akashic, 2007), The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006), GraceLand (FSG, 2004), and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections are Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001); and he is the curator of Akashic Books' Black Goat Poetry Series. He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize & a Guggenheim Award.
$15.95
ISBN-13: 9781933354880
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Akashic Books, 10/2009

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!


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