Selected by Chris Abani for the Black Goat imprint of Akashic Books, The Ravenous Audience is Kate Durbin's debut collection of poetry. Little Red Riding Hood, Jezebel, Catherine Breillat's Real Young Girl, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Christ are only a few of the archetypal and pop cultural characters that populate this strange and mesmerizing coming-of-age tale.
"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, Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2017)
"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 The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems
"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 Selected Poems
"Iconophilic, starving...a gurlesque horror show." - Johannes Göransson, Rain Taxi
"The Ravenous Audience [strips] multiple layers of distance away from the raw and monstrous experience of existence." -Christopher Higgs, 3:AM Magazine
"A deliciously disturbing collection of poems that delivers a sensory-emotional feast ripe with smells, sounds, and flavors of the sacred and the profane." -The Feminist Review
“Durbin takes us through the maze of mirrors, where one woman's gaze is another woman's reflection, and into the dark realms of the forest, where everyone is unique but, as in that other world, not everything is as it seems. Masks are worn, claws are temporarily retracted. Little girls are told not to stray from the path, for there are wolves lurking in the shadows and witches waiting by their ovens.” -Kiss the Witch
“I, too, have often wondered, what happened to Amelia Earhart? Who was the real Marilyn Monroe? And though these women will never be able to answer these questions, Durbin gives us her own version of the “truth,” while at the same time addressing the audience with the question, why do we have such an insatiable appetite to know? Using a multitude of forms, Durbin cracks into the world of her subjects, women from film and lore, to study the parts that ooze and drip out…”-Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, The Splinter Generation
