Michael Turner

The Pornographer's Poem is an edgy, important novel that tests the lines between pornography and art, exploitation and exploration. Introduced at the age of 16 to adult cinema by an eccentric teacher, the unnamed narrator of this controversial novel secretly shoots a short film of his neighbors having a very unconventional kind of sex. Helped by his doomed poet friend Nettie, who thinks such work can be liberating, he uses what are essentially porn loops to try to make sense of the world, to right its wrongs, in the process becoming a cause célèbre in the underground. But seen first through the eyes of a child and later an alienated adult of indeterminate age, this world is a brutal one populated by disposable people. In his highly acclaimed third novel, Michael Turner deftly blends time shifts, tableaux of radical sexuality and degradation, and an unexpected coming-of-age theme, bringing comparisons to Salinger and other chroniclers of growing up absurd.

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