Join us for a reading with Arielle Greenberg, E.C. Belli, Julia Guez, LiAundra Grace, and Julie Kantor. We’ll be celebrating the recent release of Arielle Greenberg’s I Live in the Country & other dirty poems.

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 non-monogamous 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.”

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.

E.C. Belli is the author of Objects of Hunger (SIU Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Verse, AGNI, and FIELD, among others. She is the translator of I, Little Asylum by Emmanuelle Guattari (Semiotext(e), 2014) and The Nothing Bird : Selected Poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd (Oberlin College Press, 2013).

Julia Guez is a poet, writer and translator. Her first collection of poetry, In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame, came out this fall from Four Way Books. For the last decade, Guez has been working with Teach For America. She also teaches creative writing at Rutgers. Guez lives in Brooklyn. (Photo credit: Wesley Mann.)

LiAundra Grace believes poetry is the gateway for those who have yet to find a connection to written words. Her work has been published in the 2014 Cave Canem Anthology, in Toe Good Poetry’s online journal, and in the 2008 Inprint Houston Poetry Compilation. Currently, Grace is working on her first collection of poems as well as her first children’s book, while teaching at Lone Star College. Grace received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is a Cave Canem Fellow. She currently resides in Katy, Texas with her husband and two children.

Julie Kantor is an artist/scholar living in Austin, TX. Her chapbook, LAND, was published by Dikembe Press in 2015. Her poetry has appeared in the I Scream Social Anthology, Boston Review, Public Space, Los Angeles Quarterly Review of Books, elsewhere, and has been translated into Ukrainian. She is on the board of directors for Cuneiform Press. She is a PhD candidate in American Studies at University of Texas Austin, finishing her dissertation on reality television and political experience.