10/07/2025
Next in our PARROT revisitation series is PARROT 15: Kept Women by Kate Durbin. This one is SOLD OUT!
There are many intimate paths that wind their way around this expensive Eden, with many nooks for hidden rendezvous. The wide lawns are spacious enough for vast tents suitable for hosting parties such as a Midsummer Nights Dream lingerie gala. There are several sloping hills, idyllic for topless slip n’ sliding in the summer or sledding over a gleaming expanse of imported snow in the winter. A marble panel is visible just inside the video monitored main gate, presen ting a depiction of Aurora, Roman goddess of the sunrise, guiding a group of young Eves into the southern Californian dawn.
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Included in Ms. Magazine’s list of 2012’s Best Books of Poetry by Women
“Kept Women is a well-crafted observation of curation, both in life and onscreen, and its effect on the viewer. Just as Hefner controls his life, image, and ‘girlfriends’ through selection, availability, and placement of objects, Durbin, through her speaker, controls what the reader sees, and, perhaps more importantly, does not see.” —Lysette Simmons, Tarpaulin Sky
“Kate Durbin is an artist on par with Kubrick and she is skilled enough to create the kind of vessels that those who regard her work as readers and viewers and tumblrers can fill with the full scale of their fear, repulsion, and fascination. If one is not prepared to face those feelings, they can overwhelm.” —Kari Larsen, Anobium
“At its most basic, Kept Women is a series of prose poems that describes the rooms of the Pl***oy Mansion as seen on the reality show The Girls Next Door. Yet its twelve pages draw on all of the above discourses—tourism, advertising, archaeology, reality TV, anthropology—to reveal, and flaunt, what they share: a voyeuristic sensibility and a fascination with and desire to absorb, or reject, otherness...Kept Women is quintessential Durbin: strange, beguiling, and funny in a nervous, beyond-ironic way.” —Megan Milks, The Fanzine
