As its title proclaims, Eve's Striptease delivers a female voice that seeks to "find out for (her)self/ all the desires a body can hold." Through artful acts of revelation and concealment, these poems test experience against the notions of love and loss that tradition and religion have taught us. These narrative and lyric poems celebrate desire, marriage, and domestic life; they visit sexual terror and consider sickness and death. Construing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, this work suggests that the maps that we need for this journey may be found written on our own bodies. Kasdorf writes of a life's migrations, tracing paths that joyfully enlarge our definitions of love and longing - sometimes embracing conventional values and sometimes subverting them.

Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of Sleeping Preacher, Eve's Striptease, Poetry in America, and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary project created in collaboration with photographer Steven Rubin. She has also published a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and a biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.