Mark A. McCutcheon teaches literary studies at Athabasca University. His debut book of poems, Shape Your Eyes By Shutting Them, was published in 2019 by Athabasca UP. He is also the author of The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology (2018). Mark's poetry and short fiction have been published in literary magazines like Grain, On Spec, EVENT, Carousel, and subTerrain; his articles and chapters on Canadian popular culture, postcolonialism, and copyright have appeared in The Explicator, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, English Studies in Canada, and other scholarly journals and books. He's on Twitter and Mixcloud as @sonicfiction, and on Instagram as @markamccutcheon. 

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Technology, a word that emerged historically first to denote the study of any art or technique, has come, in modernity, to describe advanced machines, industrial systems, and media. McCutcheon argues that it is Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein that effectively reinvented the meaning of the word for modern English. It was then Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and its adaptations in Canadian popular culture that popularized, even globalized, a Frankensteinian sense of technology. The Medium Is the Monster shows how we cannot talk about technology—that human-made monstrosity—today without conjuring Frankenstein, thanks in large part to its Canadian adaptations by pop culture icons such as David Cronenberg, William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, and Deadmau5. In the unexpected connections illustrated by The Medium Is the Monster, McCutcheon brings a fresh approach to studying adaptations, popular culture, and technology. 

In 2019, The Medium Is the Monster won the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology.

In this inventive collection of poems, McCutcheon engages in sophisticated literary play and deploys the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, cut-up, and defamiliarization. Moving from eroticism to the macabre and from transformative quotation to the individual idiom, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them explores intertextuality in poetry by challenging the cultural tradition of seeing quotation as derivative. 

Coming Fall 2026.