Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles

Poetry. Taking formal and methodological inspiration from the speedcore, thrash-jazz "miniatures" of John Zorn's Naked City, the poems of TORTURE GARDEN: NAKED CITY PASTORELLES are dense, impacted crystals of reference and insinuation: Hegel to Hüsker Dü; Milton to Moorcock; a high-style restaurant on Edinburgh's Royal Mile to the Meadowlands; Ruskin to webcam S&M. These concentrated bursts of cynicism, rancor, and frustrated lyricism are not minima moralia for an electronic age, but literate squawks thrown at the screen of contemporaneity's faceless spectacle.