Old Books Page
Home/Birth: A Poemic, creative nonfiction collaboration with Rachel Zucker (1913 Press, 2011).
“Home/Birth: A Poemic is an empowering, honest, generous, painful must-read for mothers-to-be and those who love them.” —Ricki Lake & Abby Epstein (producers of The Business of Being Born & authors of Your Best Birth)
“Years ago I gave birth to three children in a hospital, each one spilling forth in a genre unlike the one before. Natural, epidural, endless. This book would have been of great interest to me then. Now it is here in time for my daughters, not just the ones who are poets or prose writers, but the daughters who are students and workers and mothers to be. These daughters live in great peril and fight their way through to the consolation of a home that is safe. Home/Birth represents that consolation, and the bravery required to secure it.” —Fanny Howe
“Greenberg and Zucker have written an intimate, raw, beautiful book. Home/Birth lets you in on a conversation, a most important conversation, between friends, between women, between a woman and herself. It feels like the ancestor midwives are listening in, too, chiming in with reassurance, stories, outrage, wisdom. In a culture that so often silences this conversation with fear and shame and smiles and nods, Greenberg and Zucker sustain it through the interruptions and soundbites, including them in the discourse but never letting them shut it down. Like birth itself, this conversation is not linear or predictable; it is messy and real and powerful, and a gift to be privy to. ‘We haven’t even begun to talk about…’ is one of the book’s refrains, but there’s so very much here.” — Jennifer Block
Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics, co-edited with Lara Glenum, (Saturnalia, 2010).
Poetry and visual art compendium, plus critical essays, on a theory of Third Wave feminist aesthetics I developed.
“‘It is not a movement, or a camp or a clique.’ So writes Arielle Greenberg in her introduction to the phenomenon now to be known as ‘the Gurlesque.’ So what is it? Think theory in fishnets, think beyond camp, think cute with claws, Plath with humor, passivity without pathos, think pink with a gun. Gurlesque is a sensibility and a style, a walking panic attack, a threat and a promise. Don’t just read this book, ingest it, become it, perform it!” (Judith Jack Halberstam )
Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, co-edited with Rachel Zucker (University of Iowa Press, 2010).
An anthology of original poems commissioned and composed by a wide range of America’s most exciting poets during the first 100 days of Obama’s administration.
“I love this idea, and I love these poems. The poem-a-day breeziness of the work is instructive not only to poets but also to cultural and academic critics, and Starting Today will be an important cultural and historical document. The editors cast a wide net when considering poets for this project and then trusted the poets themselves to come up with quality work. In doing so, they have accomplished something amazing. Obama is known for assembling strong teams—and the editors have done this as well. The poets, representing various schools, approach their poetry ‘assignment’ with vigor, intelligence, and wit.”—Denise Duhamel, author, Ka-Ching! and Two and Two
Shake Her (Dusie Kollektiv, edited and made by Jen Hofer, 2009). A reprint of this chapbook, which centers around the Shakers and their founder, Mother Ann Lee, as a way into discussing a difficult mother-daughter relationship, will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2012.
Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, co-edited with Rachel Zucker (University of Iowa, 2008)
“Much has been written by and about women poets and women’s poetry, but this is the first that addresses the topic of mentorship in a way that expands what we mean by ‘tradition.’ No other book looks at the question of how tradition moves from one generation to the next, from the younger generation’s point of view. My own poetry students have talked about the need for exactly such a book. Women Poets on Mentorship will be important to today’s (and tomorrow’s) poetry community, as well as to women’s studies.”—Alicia Ostriker, author, Writing Like a Woman and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America
My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005)
In her second book, MY KAFKA CENTURY, Arielle Greenberg raises the gothic, European ghosts sealed under the glib facade of contemporary American culture. Trying on the sometimes hilarious, sometimes discomforting guises of Jewish folk humor, pop eroticism and kiddie epistemology, she reveals and revels in the cracks and contradictions of a bristling, brainy Babel.
Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan Press, 2003)
From New Michigan’s website: “This is another strange project that is very much in keeping with her other books. She’s exciting, energetic, diffuse at times, and linguistically definitely on. This chapbook tries to parse the real-life strange world of a murder trial through the lens of a sort-of bluegrass opera. Really odd. Really good. A finalist for our contest in 2003.”
Given (Verse Press, 2002)
“Swift, tender, original-from the first word this poetry can be no other. New consciousnesses shine here in delicate, angry, ecstatic, funny, heartbroken play: the forked lightning of true poetry.”–Jean Valentine
“The shapes of things shift in Arielle Greenberg’s wonderful book Given. The poems violate the edges of topic, speaker, and narrative again and again; they invite you to “Come choose the terrible choice.” They demand but oh they reward.”–C. S. Giscombe
Youth Subcultures: Exploring Underground America (Longman Topics, 2006)
Youth Subcultures by Arielle Greenberg uses a cultural studies lens to explore contemporary American youth subcultures such as skateboarding, punk, Goth, and raves in a brief, flexible, and inexpensive college composition and cultural studies reader.