The Ravenous Audience

A startling debut volume, the latest in Chris Abani’s Black Goat poetry series.

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 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!

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