25/11/21

Melancholy cheese strings on the train, a hart-leap well I’m damned if I’m a deer again, headlit and what the head does sunk into blue is it. We have no context for this, the original product, having never eaten cheese that comes from the moo cow, not exactly, having pulled strips of this I always felt, used to date one with the cheese string hair, the way it fell lank orange and I’m sorry for saying it, wanting to tease these strips from his hair, and I was just a curious baby. If you put, no dip, all toes in the well, well it’s high time a change is gonna come. Couldn’t load search results because of the depth, the whole swell of it well I’ll belong there, the deep abyss of the waterproof trousseau which inherits the earth like a skateboard. All season I’ve been sick, the prologue to sickness, a sort of viscosity which gets in your chest, spit language, pulp and gingham, mentioning the internet. I am so green! At this stage where it’s all just fault, scroll/draw a line around your perfect day, London Euston. There was a time you’d arrive here and find it empty, sucking the thyme lozenge, applying the apricot jam of a space bar not to wear out the sorbitol or play gong, I’m so tired. Flip. I’m so tired and watching comedians run around the room in my sleep and collapsed at the great palace, rows and rows of goldcrest poppies belonging to fields themselves, garish, give them back. Intermittent jewellery is to be worn tangibly and not taken, the lecture theatre in my dreams full of kittens is mewing even after they’re gone. Please keep your distance. Please don’t sit here. It’s not about distance, it’s all about air. Peeling strips of the sentence to eat again; this tastes fake, it’s plastic. The kittens I’m certain wouldn’t eat it. I don’t remember ever enjoying anything or feeling ascent to a feeling, don’t remember what the sea is. I don’t remember yesterday. The present-tense is lovely. It is a pilot launch of tiny utopias. You look so gold in the train light at two o’clock your hair is long and gold you are wearing the rose-print pensive you are reading Ludd Gang. A blousy afternoon. I don’t remember my body underneath the white jeans, I remember my body waitressing. Want space to lie down alone crying very softly, catalytic and deeply the infinite when you start crying and then realise that you are crying for everything, there is so much saved up to cry about you’ve been waiting a long time without knowing, a whole spree of feelings — dropping the platter of mussels, two plates — just to be present in the world to have this reason to cry it’s very beautiful. Someone always asks why are you crying, I don’t know why I am crying is to follow or curl into the fact of their question — it isn’t a knowledge, never was. Haar and garlic. I never was crying for knowing something or unknowing it’s just being born the overlove, blurred, I don’t know I can see anymore. I mean see the real thing. When the screen comes as a dream does it’s blue and pressing, how my fingers dissolved all the letters of the keys like pigment or prints transferred. Medicinal juices. How does it happen? Fabric curlicues traced on my clavicle, henna swirl. Special oils secreted or birdshit on train carriage windows, sandwich containers, pieces of gingerbread. Finally I understand where the midlands is by moving a chair and falling on England, a whole new river. Maria but this is the North. You can’t just peel the river off the land like a string of cheese, an artery, waltz into the takeaway late at night be like “mate you still open?” nostalgic for the physical prime of my body and what I did with it, shift to shift, horrendous aporia of cereals knotted in the permanent heartburn of Tuesday. Please mind the step down onto the plateau it’s callous a thousand, mini gingerbread people of the world unite; I bite off my head, I bite off yours. In just two hours my out of office turns on. We turn me. More than 90% of children around the world are breathing air toxicity in the breath of the earth, exhaling grace, the silver gelatine print of the sky is false. It’s all false. What I mean is even if the possibility of the correct thing were falling on my head “like a piano” I would still be a child, pushing 1p coin between keys because I want the sharps to stick. So always to drone on the halo, orange of all lossy tooth or floss the pith from your 16:10, fucking on cough sweets. On departure from the palindrome of your life just like, poem. Haha poem. A trust fund for skylarks is raised and cancelled. Lost in the haar. Wings deserve better as people do for the want of a ceiling, warm bed, something to curl their limbs inside and feel okay. It’s for the want of feeling okay that I want to write. Alright. November is the cruellest month alongside March and August. Hold it betwixt your thumb and middle finger until it is swallowed a moon. This is very small in the glandular scheme of things with everyone’s suitcase cabaret and the carbon dating of marijuana. Well if I’m damned to it, drink from the hart-leap well I don’t feel so often, a kinda sippy paradise we all deserve excepting tories, haha, they’re out for our blood and onions, well if I’m bambi I’ll be okay, the water is warm and moving.

The Luna Erratum

My first full-length poetry book is now slinking out into the world!

The details:

138pp. with inside illustrations by Maria Sledmere and cover design by Douglas Pattison

Typeset by T. Person

ISBN: 978-1-8380156-5-7

RRP: £10.99

Order from Dostoyevsky Wannabe.

The Luna Erratum, Maria Sledmere’s debut poetry collection, roams between celestial and terrestrial realms where we find ourselves both the hunter and hunted, the wounded and wounding. Through elemental dream logics of colour, luminosity and lagging broadband, this is a post-internet poetics which swerves towards the ‘Other Side’: a vivid elsewhere of multispecies relation, of error and love, loss and nourishment. Its leitmotif of Luna, a shapeshifting feline of satellite proportion, waxes and wanes through poems which move beyond the twilight moods of left melancholia, sad hospitality and ecological crisis towards a fugitive imaginary that lingers in the ‘Flirtation Device’ of lyric and its many echolocations.

Taking cue from Jenny Boully’s ‘erratum’ — ‘the text of what is and the text of what should have been’ — Sledmere writes with failure, friction and fractal attention, with a yearning for intimacy, shelter and ongoing ways of bearing the im/possible. She offers poems of mystery, refusal and pain at personal, political and planetary scales, tracing the desire-lines of the everyday and its glitching encounters. The Luna Erratum is a book of memory and friendship in the so-called anthropocene, of bodily disorder, painterly gesture, quantum kissing, rodent sisterhood, open world intervention, technology, tenderness, shimmer and song.

Praise for The Luna Erratum: 

How do you explain yourself to yourself when you suspect that actuality – your experience of it – is provisional and full of error? You come up with your own poetics, your own tense and mode of address, which is a lunar one, and which involves speaking in crushed, frothy mouthfuls to a terrifyingly silent, unpredictable and generous friend (celestial objects, an indifferent lover, &c.). 

The Luna Erratum offers no truth except in things – colours, materials, beings, dreams, schemes of language, human artefacts and locations – and their known convergences, all of which hold as much affective weight and capacity for transformation as the events that precipitated this profoundly graceful, unsettling and mesmerising book.

— Sophie Collins, author of Who is Mary Sue? (Faber, 2018)

A glittering universe, Maria Sledmere’s first poetry collection is both lyrical and electric, both video game and watercolour. Reading these poems feels like ingesting semantic MDMA, the ectoplasm of a Victorian ghost trying to reach her lover through an unstable wifi connection. Sledmere’s words ooze a desire that is part animal, part human, part astral body. Let them transfix you.

— Nadia de Vries, author of I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021)

In Maria Sledmere’s The Luna Erratum, rivulets of neon daylight stream through the ever-quickening fibre-optic cables of the soul. Beneath ‘morphine clouds’ climates change as human groans crosspollinate in the moon’s tread. Sledmere concentrates the neural pathways on the world spirit, crossmatching the matters of attention. The lines grasp at what repositories of sentiment might be made secure for poetic memory, as the pleasure of every experience is threatened by its immediate disappearance, like Bernadette Mayer reciting Keats in the abandoned sea life centre. And yet, for the poet’s eye, the sumptuous bounties of the world are still all up for grabs; the human squats on top of the non-human and: ‘you can take bites from the sun’. This book is a hot tub full of Tamagotchi frogs’ spawn glistening in the light of the full moon atop the Yggdrasil skyscraper.

— Ed Luker, author of Other Life (Broken Sleep, 2020)

If you would like a copy for review, or to stock in your bookshop, please email mariasledmere [at] outlook [dot] com. 🙂