Gurlesque ─ The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics

Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics brings together eighteen poets of wide-ranging backgrounds, united in their ability to push the aesthetic envelope through radical, femme, Third Wave strategies, and pairs them with visual artists who do the same. At the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing the emergence of a vital--perhaps viral--new strain of female poetics: the "Gurlesque," a term that describes writers who perform femininity in their poems in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking the grotesque to shake the foundations of acceptable female behavior and language. Built from the bric-a-brac of girl culture, these works charm and repel: this work is fun, subversive, and important. Poets include Brenda Coultas, Brenda Shaghnessy, Cathy Park Hong, Matthea Harvey, and Sarah Vap.

LARA GLENUM is the author of The Hounds of No (Action Books, 2005) and Maximum Gaga (Action Books, 2008). With Josef Horacek, she translates 20th C. Czech poetry, most recently the selected poems of the Czech poet Vladimir Holan, a project that has received a Fulbright Fellowship and an NEA Translation Award. She lives and teaches in Athens, GA, where she curates the VOX Emerging Writers Series. ARIELLE GREENBERG's My Kafka Century (Action, 2005) and Given (Verse/Wave, 2002), the chapbook Far(t)her Down: Song from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003), and, with Rachel Zucker, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections (Iowa, 2008). Her poems have been included the 2004 and 2005 editions of Best American Poetry and a number of other anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers (Sarabande, 2006), and she is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship and other awards. She is assistant professor of English at Columbia College Chicago.