Excited to announce the release date of Cyber Smut - 15 September 2020! Pre-orders are available on Guts website - with a nice discount too, valid until 14 September.
If you haven't had a chance to check out our contributors, take a look at their bios and photos here: https://www.gutspublishing.com/cyber-smut-contributors
Starting next week, we'll be posting written and video interviews with our contributors so you can get acquainted with them. And, here's a blurb from the back cover of Cyber Smut to whet your appetite:
"Cyber Smut is a collection of poetry, real-life experiences and daring fiction. It is an exploration of life online and the impact of technology on our lives. From the critical theory-informed essay ‘Cyberwhores_Sex_Robots_and_Aliens’ to the satire ‘I’d Give Her the Dickinson’ to the investigation of artificial intelligence in ‘The Call’ to the unvarnished truth behind ‘Send Nudes’."
To start, I'd like to introduce you to poet Roger Craik. We'll be posting a full interview with Roger in the coming weeks, and we'll talk about his Cyber Smut poem 'In the Machine (2004)', but for today you're in for a treat. Roger has shared with us, and allowed us to publish on this blog, his poem 'Pornographic Incident'.
PORNOGRAPHIC INCIDENT
Synthesized twinkling in medias res.
“There's something apt about that techno stuff,”
I muse in bladder-wrack flaccidity:
The script of grunts to keep the urgency,
The tattooed roses and the hulking shifts
Of placement in a plastic bloomless world,
And then weight-lifting grimaces until
The slowed-down arching proof that it’s all real—
All smirkingly preserved as bliss on film
By armpit-damp director camera man.
Yet into pleasure’s sharp-cut hot-lit cube,
Pornography's timelessly rented room
Where no clock marks the time beside the bed,
Where no one's uninvited or rebuffed,
This time there curled a different siren’s wail
(Police or ambulance I couldn't tell)
Admitting with unwholesome thrillingness
The hot grit-laden fetid world outside
Where one cheap clock is ticking as she’s raped
Or lies in childbirth on a kitchen floor.
* * *
Roger Craik was born in Leicester and has worked in universities in Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria and America. He has written four full-length books of poetry, of which the latest is Down Stranger Roads (Blazevox, 2014). He lives in Ashtabula, Ohio.
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