Additional information
by Arielle Greenberg (Author)
Arielle Greenberg's I Live in the Country & other dirty poems exploits and undoes the stereotype of the "wholesome country life." Here, the speaker moves to the country ("where the animals are") in order to live a whole life, one in which she can live honestly and openly in a nonmonogamous marriage. Her book is a visceral, erotic celebration of the cornucopia of sexual pleasures to be had in that rural life--in the muck of a pasture in spring or behind the bins of whole-wheat pastry flour at the local co-op. Greenberg hauls out what has previously been stored under dark counters and labeled deviant--kink, fetish, and bondage--and moves it into the sunshine of sex-positivity and mutual consent. In doing so, she forges new literary territory--a feminist re-visioning of the Romantic pastoral poems of seduction. "I am trying to turn my eye toward joy," she writes. "My heart toward bliss."
Author Biography
Arielle Greenberg's previous poetry collections are Come Along with Me to the Pasture Now, Slice, My Kafka Century and Given. She's also the writer of the creative nonfiction book Locally Made Panties, the transgenre chapbooks Shake Her and Fa(r)ther Down, and co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic. She has co-edited three anthologies, including Gurlesque, forthcoming in an expanded digital edition co-edited with Becca Klaver. Arielle's poems and essays have been featured in Best American Poetry, Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers and The Racial Imaginary, among other anthologies. She wrote a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review, and edited a series of essays called (K)ink: Writing While Deviant for The Rumpus. A former tenured professor in poetry at Columbia College Chicago, she lives with her family in Maine, where she writes, edits, teaches and works for a creative services agency.
