Control, by Cecilia Stelzer

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Control is a work of erotic, experimental poetry—ambiently disturbing and linguistically porous. It dissects the structures of sexual and societal power with mantic and corporeal intensity. The language flexes itself towards its undoing, its inverse, and its mirror. It traces out liminal spaces and works through ideas of possession, surveillance, technology, and dominance.

Control’s verse bends language into new anatomies, with a style that is both abstract and obsessive. It layers and cuts through bodily and digital memory, subjecthood and objecthood, self and Other, autonomy and submission. It is a document of contemporary desire and control.

“If Mina Loy got uploaded into a cuntstruck technomatrix, her poetry might read like this. Cecilia Stelzer is a master and Control is the 21st-century ride I want to be on.”

—Catherine Wagner

“What happens when I write into the temptation to believe that the algorithm knows what kind of sex I want? ‘Is it porn or poem?,’ asks the speaker of Control. What begins here sounding like anodyne eros achieves the intensity of abject desire, with all its strategies of repetition, substitution, and transposition, a desire frustrated, hollowed and filled by data that cannot fulfil it. This is a poetics of want mediated by screen-life where the alternative to porn is the poem invested in the phantasmatic work to make the image real. Recalling Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups, Stelzer’s lines amplify the feeling of an A.I. whose metadata threatens to become us, and the sadness that results when the only way to wrest control of the machine is to embody desire’s ghost.”

—Rob Halpern

“Cecilia Stelzer’s new chapbook, Control, constructs a pixilated story of a love affair in 10 poems. Control is brief but intense. Each poem condenses linguistic and erotic tensions in an unseemly and genuine way. Her lips control her lover’s song while together they speak for each other, while their genders switch, and pure linguistic relations shape them. From the sincere religion of ‘erectile divination’ to the nightly tragedy of ‘aria of dog’ Control will keep you reading.”

—James Sherry

Cecilia Stelzer is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn, NY.