“8 Poetry Books That Distort and Manipulate Time”
These poets assert agency over the wobbly bounds of temporality
by Alex Moreno
Electric Lit, 18 Nov 2025
disgust spins our speaker through a week of degradation orchestrated by an unseen dom figure. Born from an audio transcript of a performance piece, the book is an epic, grotesque confessional poem. The text is split into seven days, each with a varying number of intervals. The result is a hyper-present, hyper-immediate narrative. But distorted. Each day, quotidian acts like opening a door, cooking, and dressing are disrupted by the mounting limitations of “d’s” protocol. These limitations also contort the speaker’s concept of time. They lose track of the days and, dislodged, say, “I am can hardly remember anything. Everything is getting lost. I have no writing. It’s hard to speak my mouth isn’t working. I’m tired. Everything in reverse.” The form of transcription, with its stutters, misplaced punctuation, and indistinct muttering, creates an overflowing world of distress. In disgust, Saint Spero envelops us in this one, suffocating week, with little room to escape.