Addressing the issue of representing the contemporary city in poetry, Ian Monk’s Plouk Town creates an urban vision of dirt, waste, and rejection, inhabited by a humiliated, anonymous population. This study illustrates how the fictional French suburb contrasts with a postcard francitude through the association with images of violence and disgust. Monk’s use of the sestina and numeric sequences creates a textual spiral which can be read as a statistic-poetic effort to write the contemporary city and its inventory of humiliating daily routines.