Erlorn Marshk’s “34 AI Poems With the Word Cuck in Them” is an oddly tender, unexpectedly resonant experiment in digital language and human longing.

 By JF Hugo

There’s no shortage of AI-generated poetry books populating the internet’s weirder corners — perhaps the definitive book of the genre is I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks: Poems by code-davinci-002.  Most are novelties: curiosities to screenshot, skim, and discard. 

But 34 AI Poems With the Word Cuck in Them by Erlorn Marshk manages something rarer — it turns what could be a one-note gag into a strangely soulful meditation on masculinity, shame, and digital culture’s absurd poetics.

The premise is blunt: every poem in the book contains the word “cuck.” But rather than resting on the word’s notoriety, Marshk uses AI to excavate and recontextualize it. The result is not just 34 jokes, but 34 attempts to understand a word that has, as Marshk writes in the introduction, been “distorted and reanimated by so many evolving cultural contexts."

There’s wit here, sure. In “Cuck, But With Flowers,” the speaker reflects on buying peonies for a lover he’s just fired from his tech startup — a setup worthy of a John Wilson voiceover:

“There is something cucky about all of this—
the flowers, the talking,
the way I bought peonies for you
before I fired you from my tech startup.”

But the real surprise is how frequently these AI-generated poems manage to tip into startlingly resonant emotional sincerity. “Kitchen Table Issues,” one of the few prose-poems in the collection, pivots from nostalgic hijinks to something that resembles grief:

“Every morning I stand in my kitchen and drink my tea with
my bare feet on the cold linoleum but every now and then I see the glow of a
sparkler in someone’s window and for a second, in my head, there it is—
your voice in my ear doing that stupid impression of The Boss.”

It’s a moment as affecting as anything in a contemporary lyric collection, made uncanny by the knowledge that it was, at least largely, machine-assembled. 

Unlike other AI poetry projects that marvel at the generative process itself, Marshk’s book is more interested in meaning as artifact: how language, once weaponized, can be softened and strange again. Even when the AI shows its seams — in dream logic leaps, awkward enjambments, or images that feel like autofill hallucinations — the voice remains surprisingly human. The real trick isn't an AI writing poems, but rather a set of poems that stretch the word "cuck" in every possible direction.

This isn't gimmick poetry, it's simplify poetry. Still, Marshk seems aware of the risk of his click-baity premise, and even plays with it. In “Neon Cathedral,” a scathing anti-capitalist psalm, the speaker declares:

“My body becomes ledger and ledger becomes prison…
knowing I am nothing but a cuck / to the god of endless consumption.”

There’s irony, yes. But there’s also something else: a kind of digitally mediated heartbreak.

Many poems stretch into the political, the cosmic, or even the spiritual — the collection boasts titles such as "Watching The Bachelorette with a Cuck," "The Ocean, a Timebomb," and "In the Dark Night I Met God." The result? World-weary critiques of modern masculinity, explorations of cuckoldry as a metaphor for spiritual submission, and a run of poems exploring the cosmic power dynamics between the planets in our solar system.

With 34 AI Poems With the Word Cuck in Them, Marshk and an overworked ChatGPT bot have done something more than meme the word. He’s deconstructed it, rinsed it through machine logic, and held it up to the light until something glimmered.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is Rupi Kaur Changing Poetry?

  By T.S. Craft When Rupi Kaur self-published her first book of poems in 2014, few could have predicted the global tremor that would follow. Her debut, Milk and Honey , with its stark lowercase vulnerability and line-broken heartbreak, exploded on Instagram before most literary gatekeepers knew what was happening. By the time traditional publishers caught up, Kaur was a phenomenon — not just a poet, but a brand, a movement, a mood. But is she changing poetry? That depends on who you ask. To her millions of fans — many of them young women of color navigating trauma, identity, and longing — Kaur is a revelation. Her work, often accompanied by hand-drawn line art, distills emotion into digestible doses: a few words that stab clean through, like a haiku with a selfie filter. She's democratized the form, taking poetry off the dusty bookshelf and dropping it into your feed. If Sylvia Plath had an iPhone, maybe she'd be posting like this too. To her critics, Kaur’s minimalist aes...
Read more

In “34 AI Poems With the Word Cuck in Them,” Absurdity Becomes a Liturgy

  By Jeff Hebert There are poetry collections that whisper. Some that wail. Erlorn Marshk’s 34 AI Poems With the Word Cuck in Them does something stranger — it murmurs, memes, and spirals until you’re unsure whether you’re in a confessional booth, a group chat, or a Slack channel with God. Conceived as a conceptual stunt — all 34 poems contain the word “cuck” — the collection is part digital performance, part cultural excavation, and surprisingly, part devotional text. Marshk, a pseudonymous author-editor working with generative AI, invites us into a book that feels both rigorously absurd and heartbreakingly sincere. The premise could have collapsed under its own irony. “Cuck,” after all, is one of the internet’s most weaponized words — once a fringe insult, now an all-purpose barb deployed across political, sexual, and cultural lines. But Marshk’s poems don’t just poke fun at the term; they metabolize it. They ask what it means to feel sidelined, to love without reciprocity, to e...
Read more