Eve's Striptease

"You have to admire a poet who can take an onion, the flu, houseguests, migraines, and a nurse's coat and turn them in to poetry. Of course, Kasdorf is using the concrete to get a deeper things: there's an amazement at life in these poems, and a hard-headed determination to make it work." --Library Journal "It may initially seem as though Kasdorf has meant to shock the home folks with her new book. Think of her overall themes: Mennonites and sex, a novel connection. Yet Eve's Striptease uses these two lenses to focus on the world. However, viewing the book only in terms of ethnicity and biology trivializes what is a significant work by a brilliant young poet. . . . It is a book about coming to terms with one's sexuality and how that affects one's place in the world." --Pittsburgh Quarterly "Most readers will be grateful for the gift outright of Kasdorf's achingly beautiful language of desire and of a "full store" of unavoidable passings from discovery to dark discovery and from expectations and surprises of childhood to retrospections and surprises of adulthood." --Mennonite Quarterly Review "Crosshatched by body, spirit, and the relation between them; animated by bright instinctive exchanges between carnal and religious zones of experience; driven by an honest, explicitly female consciousness of what 'animal' and 'soul' might mean, the poems in Eve's Striptease keep pace with a considered life in its search for some consoling 'homeliness' in the world." --Eamon Grennan Julia Kasdorf grew up in Western Pennsylvania. Her previous collection, Sleeping Preacher, was the winner of the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was awarded the 1993 Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for New Writing. Eve's Striptease was named one of Library Journal's Top 20 Best Poetry Books of 1998. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and various anthologies and journals. She teaches at Messiah college and lives in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.