Kate Durbin

I also received this great collection as a first read and have been reading and re-reading it slowly until now. As some people have mentioned, this is not your usual poetry fair. I would say it could fit in the prose-poetry category better. There are some pieces that are entirely in poetic form and some in prose form and others in a mixture. The subject matter, if one is allowed to speak of such a thing, centers around a certain gender (female), certain political lean (feminist), and a certain voice (nostalgia with a pinch of anger and a pint of blood) in almost all of the pieces, some of which form mini collections of their own. Strangely enough, when I was reading a lot of the pieces for the first time I thought they evoked certain films for me, and later realized that some titles were in common with Catherine Breillat's films (confirmed by the notes int he back, I only discovered after I read the whole book!) Now, Breillat is an acquired taste, I would say, and certainly, up until recently her works have been low-budget, hit-or-miss, strange sexual explorations of women, often confused women. Perhaps The Ravenous Audience is also an acquired taste, but certainly a very interesting read. I almost feel like the pieces in the collection that correspond to Breillat's films make sense of some of the nonsense in the films. Strange.
I particularly liked New Creature, though I will find it hard to describe here. Perhaps Hudecek's painting that inspired this piece, Psyche, is a good description. Even though I enjoyed reading the pieces about Monroe, I find Amelia Earhart fragments more fascinating (might be because I find Amelia more fascinating than Marilyn). As for those pieces that utilize the spacial elements of the page(s), I am not sure... I feel that it works well with Bearlife, but in others, though I like them for their content, I don't see what is added with a spatial form. But perhaps, that's just me...
Looking forward to more works by Kate Durbin.… (meer)