Writer
Creative Nonfiction | Drama | Fiction | Poetry
Foreign Object
Steven Teref’s hybrid collection Foreign Object follows in the lineage of his Balkan influences Vasko Popa, Novica Tadić, and Charles Simic. Teref populates his poems, experimental verse play, and translations with a horrific horde of “nightmarians,” ranging from the Slavic folkloric monster Baba Yaga to an all-too-real predatory Babysitter. This collection heals yet disturbs as it slowly grows into its cancerous crescendo—the “foreign object.” Teref effortlessly switches between lyric and narrative modes through one-line poems, prose poems, and found poems. In Teref’s hands, his hometown of Somerville, MA, sheds its current hip veneer to expose its original working class Irish roots mired in alcoholism and domestic violence, so excruciating, that it can exist only through the figurative language of Slavic mythology, Coleridge’s Geraldine, and Musil’s Man Without Qualities. Ending this collection are Teref’s translations of Serbian poet Novica Tadić—an appropriate homage.
Pleasure Objects Teaser
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 Authentic Counterfeit
The Authentic Counterfeit is an experimental play that explores the shifting inequality between therapist and patient, along with the struggle of expression inherent within their power dynamic.