Pleasure Objects Teaser

Steven Teref

For the late David Bowie, the role of the artist was “to pick through the debris of a culture, to look at what’s been forgotten or not really taken seriously.” Aside from occasional window-dressing in poems, Internet porn has remained an outlier in literature. Internet porn, that floating garbage patch, that debris sea, that black hole…in its mush of misguided feral fury, welcome me. I am your champion, your essayist. The intentionally austere alphabet sections of Pleasure Objects Teaser reflect Internet porn’s raw staging. I am saying “look at what’s out there.” I’m also saying “look at what’s in me: what’s in all of us.” I am no more guilty than you. But, who are “you?”

“the young girl emerges.
a lot of girls her age working through it.
the defile on rent knees. hacked and racked backwards. menses choke her pleas.
I become a leather fact.”

STEVEN TEREF’s books include the play The Authentic Counterfeit and the poetry collection Foreign Object (forthcoming from Negative Capability Press). He is also the translator of Ana Ristovic’s Directions for Use (forthcoming from Zephyr Press) and Novica Tadic’s Assembly..