I Live in the Country & Other Dirty Poems

"Sexually explicit poems that address the radical possibilities of a woman's pleasure and the endless varieties of human desire. 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.""--