Hot Teen Slut

by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

"The poetry world has never met a more brilliant spy in the house of porn..." Beth Lisick, author, Everybody Into the Pool In her second collection of poetry, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz serves up a hilarious and uncompromising autobiographical bender about her first job out of writing and editing for the porn industry. Whether denouncing the corporate world ("To Whom It May Concern"), or lustily joining it ("New Millennial Bad Ass"), to celebrating love in the face of smut ("Let's Make Out!"), Aptowicz dramatizes the hopes, humor and ambitions of young poet first steps into a very surreal 'real world.' This expanded version nearly triples the length of the original with previously unpublished works, including "Sass Manifesto," which was used to win the 2004 National Forsenics Championship in Poetry Interpretation.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published March 1, 2010

About the author

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is an American poet who was recently awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

She is the author of five books of poetry, including the recently released Everything is Everthing (Write Bloody Publishing), as well as the canonical slam history, Words in Your Face (Soft Skull Press), which U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote “leaves no doubt that the slam poetry scene has achieved legitimacy and taken its rightful place on the map of contemporary literature.”

Founder of the three-time National Poetry Slam Championship venue, NYC-Urbana, Cristin has toured widely with her poetry, at venues as diverse as NYC’s Joe’s Pub, LA’s Largo Theatre and Australia’s Sydney Opera House. Cristin’s poetry books are published on Write Bloody Press, and available at all online & brick-and-order bookstores.

Her poetry has appeared (or is forthcoming) in McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, Rattle, Pank, Barrelhouse, MonkeyBicycle, decomP, Conduit and La Petite Zine (among others), as well as in anthologies such as Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Spoken Word, Learn Then Burn: Modern Poetry For the Classroom, Bowery Women and Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution (among others).

Reviews

[Edmund Davis-Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the funniest book of poetry I have ever read. Bawdy and hilarious. A lot of my favorite poets use humor well. I rarely am howling with laughter reading poetry. I definitely did with "Hot Teen Slut."

[Russell Reidelberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like I need to explain this one, especially to my teacher friends. Hot Teen Slut is a memoir by Christin O'Keefe Appowitcz, one of my favorite poets. After a long job search in New York, she finds a job writing copy text for a porn website even though she is a virgin. Her poems range from frustrating to graphic to hilarious. The entire memoir examines how she handled her day job versus her personal life as well as her feminist views on the treatment of women as sexual objects. I'll read anything that Appowitcz writes and I'm glad I read this one, even though the title could put me in the creeper zone.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of it is a little over the top with all of the porn-related stuff, for my taste, but I guess that's the point of it.

To anybody who might be worried, not all of the poems are filled with explicit stuff.

I will read anything Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz writes.

[Hannah]

tbh I liked this a little less than Dear Future Boyfriend, but really it's just fantastic and funny and great.

[Chiara Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very insightful poetry collection about what it's like to work in the porn industry as a woman, I highly recommend.

[FannyWiola · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetry is a strange genre
kinda hard to define really
(even harder to define what's good poetry
and what's bad)
But I'm not sure that linebreaks like these
are what makes poetry poetry
if you catch my drift

To me this book reads more like an essay you'd find on xoJane.com back in the day, titled something "I worked writing porn descriptions and this is what I learned about sex." This is not an insult by the way, I enjoy these sort of personal essays.
And who hasn't seen a discription of a porn video or a suspicious pop-up ad and wondered "Oh my god, who actually writes these? Turns out, sometimes it's a virgin poet in desperate need of a job. Brilliant. I kinda like the absurdity of the job, things like the porn sound haikus makes me giggle - but I found it got old very fast (and this is a really short book!)
It's unclear if it's the writing itself or if I just got over the subject, but I vow to read at least one more of Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz' collections just to give her a fair chance.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aptowicz poetry is direct, emotive, and sometimes hilarious. I most definitely performance poetry though and loses some punch on the page. Elements of the use of pornography are innovative, but some are basically fairly puerile jokes. The memoir-in-verse element does read particularly dry in the beginning in a way that is distractingly prosaic at first. As one becomes more invested, Aptowicz actually does more with the forms as well as becomes more poignant. Ultimately, it is an uneven book but the mixture of humor and humanity was charming enough to keep me engaged.

[Emily Perkovich · Rating 2 out of 5]

I pushed through this because I chose it for The Sealey Challenge. I usually would DNF & not rate something if I’m not enjoying it unless there was something obviously bigoted that I thought people should know about.

I don’t know that I believe that it was the author’s intention as much as it seemed to be a blind spot. But. To me, this just made SW into a joke and perpetuated a ton of stereotypes about porn being for men and women being too good to enjoy it/being morally corrupt if they do. As someone who writes about SW semi-frequently, I don’t like to assume people include sexual content for shock value, but I couldn’t get inside this work at all, so unfortunately that’s the feeling it gave me.

[Sophia Upshaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

okay this was genuinely such a hoot. “new millenial badass” and “let’s make out!” are my favorite poems

[Mari C.L. Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems I quite liked but I could do without the low-grade homophobia (the idea that having gay sex is negative, that bottoming is bad/disparaging, etc.)

[Emma-Kate Schaake · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Apowitz and her very "un poetic" poetry. She is sharp, hilarious, and honest in her observations and I want to emulate her often in my own writing. But, this was definitely not my favorite of hers. Some good moments, and I liked how it uniquely captured a certain (and unusual) chapter in her life. Funny and raunchy and feminist, but just meh on the actual writing front.

[Annika Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't a poetry book that will leave you considering deep ideas or learning new things about yourself. But it's fun and powerful in its own way. The first few poems felt very expositiony to me, but then the book hits its stride. Worth the ride!

[erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, insightful, clever. I found it to be a little more on the ''bleak and sad' side other than the empowering one. But it was very good.

I want us to represent making out the way light bulbs represent ideas; the way Picasso represents cubism; and the way horniness represents me!

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always a good re-read!

[Ellison · Rating 4 out of 5]

features a collection of essays written by a gal that works at a computer terminal in the adult industry.

[Shira · Rating 1 out of 5]

corny

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up probably for the same reason everyone else did—the title, which makes you feel an immediate need to figure out what the collection is about so you don't feel quite so dirty. The cover art is also really intentionally designed, and I can't pretend that I'm not intrigued when a book has a nice cover. Or maybe some picked it up because they had already read one of Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's other collections, and in that case, I can say I now understand completely.

This collection caught me by surprise. I expected from the first few poems that it would have some humor and be fairly modern, much more prose-like. I did not expect Aptowicz to implement this humor so seamlessly and poignantly with her exploration of universal issues related to the transition into "adulthood" and morality versus necessity. I easily related to the struggles Aptowicz was facing, even though the context she was experiencing them in was completely foreign to me. That almost made it stick more.

I empathized with the questions she faced regarding her own values and morals as she performed work that, at many times, went against them. How do you reconcile the clashing of feminism and an industry that is often overtly misogynistic? How do you maintain your humanity when you work in a field that dehumanizes and objectifies people? But at the same time, how do you turn down an opportunity that will allow you to support yourself while technically doing something you love, even if it's not necessarily in the way you would have chosen?

These questions fascinate me, and I could not put down Hot Teen Slut until I finished the journey with Aptowicz. Though there are definitely some poems in here that made me uncomfortable or that I felt were downright overkill with the sexual focus, I'm unsure whether they aren't necessary to accomplish the overall effect the collection has on its readers. I think the only thing preventing me from giving this five stars is that I felt some more exploration could have been done into how Aptowicz reconciled these two conflicting aspects of her life—her identity and values and her job.

All in all, I'd recommend this collection, and I already have picked up another one by Aptowicz and am looking forward to reading it. She's got a powerful voice and an interesting take on the ways we navigate and survive in our modern world.

[Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hot Teen Slut is the second collection of poems by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz. It was originally published in 2001, and re-released in April of 2011 by Write Bloody Publishing. The book is memoir-in-verse, a style that seemed a little awkward and dry initially. But, as the biographical story unfolded, it became more engaging and the poems grew stronger. At its core, HTS is more than a book that successfully fuses poetry and porn. It is an intriguing account of a smart young woman/poet trying to make ends meet, and maintain some semblance of normalcy while working in the adult entertainment industry.

Just out of college, Aptowicz took a job writing and editing copy for a dot.com business. That business turned out to be pornography. From there this collection was born. Her story is unique; more so than some of the poems themselves. That being said, my favorites here included: Keeping It In Neutral, Signs Of A Daughter, The Box, The Christmas Party, Morning Date, and On Getting An Email From A High School Girl Telling Me She Loves My Writing.

[Jay Kistler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really love the structure of this book: a collection of poems that form a memoir. I’m sure there’s many more just like it, but this is my introduction to such a style of writing. The most affecting poem to me is “I Could Make Money Off Those Tits” which is a pretty crass name for an incredibly sweet poem. Unfortunately, a lot of this book hasn’t aged extremely well (do you really think it’s fair to call the first woman to “consent to titty fuck” an idiot?). Also, whenever I think of Nietzsche I think of all the chauvinists who misinterpret him, so maybe not everyone should read him. Otherwise, I want to find more books just like this one.

[J.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was much more a story than I expected, much more a narrative rather than simply a poetry collection, which I loved, and the whimsy with which Aptowicz approaches the porn industry (and its connections to the land of poetics) is pretty damn fantastic.

[Danielle Mebert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much of the same thing in these poems. The poems were not deep enough to resonate with me.

[Alice Urchin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny and heartfelt. I need to remember to save a copy of Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's poems around for when I'm in need of cheering up.

[C · Rating 2 out of 5]

Readable but just barely. Very little poetry here. It's mostly a 30 page memoir-essay with line breaks.

[Thinkinggood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bold book of poetry that is also an engaging hilarious story.