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.

Author City: BOCA RATON, FL USA

Mark Scroggins is a poet, biographer, and literary critic. His graduate degrees in creative writing and literature were from Cornell University. He is the author of Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge and a critical biography of Zukofsy. His first full-length collection of poems, Anarchy, appeared in 2003.

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