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 exist in the ambient humiliation of late capitalism.

Take “Monday Through Friday,” where the speaker refers to himself as “a ghost clocking hours that don’t belong to me,” describing the corporate grind as a kind of eroticized masochism. In “Neon Cathedral,” the poem leans all the way into sacramental language, likening the fluorescent-lit workspace to a house of worship: “My body becomes ledger and ledger becomes prison.”

That’s the trick of Cuck: it oscillates. Some poems read like tweets wearing robes (“The cuck in the group chat”), others like psalms filtered through Google Translate and back again. There’s a deep vein of emotional intelligence in “Kitchen Table Issues,” where nostalgia becomes a vehicle for loss, desire, and reluctant tenderness. Elsewhere, “Cuckmas” recasts the Passion of Christ as a kind of ultimate spiritual cuckoldry: “His heart so large / it swallowed nails.”

The AI's hand — or hallucination — is often visible, but Marshk’s gentle editing guides it toward a voice that feels intentionally scattered, like a chorus of search engine results performed by a choir of very tired, very online poets. There are lines that stumble into lyric brilliance — “He calls it majesty, / but it’s confession: / he cannot let go / of what destroyed him” — and others that land like inside jokes from a subreddit you’re not quite sure you should be reading.

Does the collection go on a little long? Perhaps. There’s a risk of thematic fatigue around poem 27, but even that may be the point. Cuck is a book about overexposure, after all — the looping repetition of images, algorithms, selves. What emerges is a strange kind of grace.

34 AI Poems With the Word Cuck in Them is more than just a gimmick. It’s an accidental scripture for a generation raised on autofill and alienation, a text that dares to say: yes, this too can be poetry. Even this. Especially this.

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