
Writing with the lights out


A briar morning of London, the original underground statuette or ahistorical blossom — what are you doing here? It is very gentle to slice the cake of your loved one’s birthday, rich dark insomnia cocoa; the sky is practicing abstinence I can’t see the stars. Consider the interface of energies required to make this: several employees gathered around with walkie-talkies, another first edition loneliness, a seat to yourself. I say to myself, “this is the morning the sky is a gradient like the standardised gradients offered by Microsoft Powerpoint in the mid-2000s” and it is not cheapening? The modern philosophy of doing your tax returns in a panic to want accountancy exhausted and proffering the invoice through which a house is saved, this is the house of the poem whose cost is enormous. What is the most expensive poem in the world and was it ever gifted for Christmas? The doorways of the poem are the blanks in the world blank dream I sing for thee, the long day doesn’t remember itself as software. A man on the train says he’s connected to mystics and he saw a person looking over me in the moment I wrote this. A man took his Tesla into the dunes to obliterate the everyday dumpling of automobile labour, that you had to repair this through various elaborate steps like I order new headphones with speakers embedded so as to walk around on the phone, like a nozzle it connects my breath to the stars. You are dropping off sleeping bags in the dream, a shelf for your glasses, a coda for napping off lavish anxieties that bloom in the elevenses of news is a fallacy. Avanti mystics. This is the worst day to pass exactitude as a micro trend or see like zoomers typing badly in the 1980s; the person is a railroad that goes on forever once they get started. Friday is a frantic alacrity I love you a briar morning, my shins torn apologies of the privileged for getting this blood so torn — a tree, a sparkle, a dove, a star. Everyone’s locked in their own toasters and burning crumbs, smoking dope commons of the momentary aerosol, first-person trauma of seeing yourself convivial in other amusements. You read? You blink game? You test positive! It is a message to educate the beautiful thumbprint of kittens who haven’t yet scratched reality out of their innocent systems. Christmas is a rate of speed. Stasis, languid and of ivy, tussling, intimacy of the leaf miner and the leaf. We need holly, poinsettia, grace. A week from today will be the new year.

From this year in-between brushing my teeth:
Miss Anthropocene (Mermaid Motel)
a selection of short lyric, ‘ethereal nu metal’ poems responding to the Elon Musk/Grimes complex.
Sonnets for Hooch – with Mau Baiocco and Kyle Lovell (Fathomsun Press)
An ongoing pamphlet series of sonnets attuned to the weirding seasons: what started as an internet joke about alcopops and longing as a keystone for exploring adolescent malaise, nostalgia and resilience thru civic space and Friendship. Current editions available are Lemon Bloom Season and Summertime Social. Two more instalments are forthcoming in association with Rat Press and Mermaid Motel.
Polychromatics (Legitimate Snack)
A pamphlet-length poem about colour, cetaceans and cosmic twilight, inspired by Walter Benjamin and a sculptural and textile works by the artist Anna Winberg.
Soft Friction – with Kirsty Dunlop (Mermaid Motel)
Soft Friction is an intimate gathering of dreams from 2018, written during a summer of ‘existential soup’, fainting at gigs, pulling all-nighters and panic surrealism. Extracted from a longer diary, these fragments wear the sensuality and sass of an active dream life shared between two people getting high on each others’ brains.
The Palace of Humming Trees (Sundays)
Edited and typeset by Katie O’Grady with visual identity by Paul Smith, this book-length poem features illustrations by Jack O’Flynn plus a curator’s word from Katie O’Grady and collaborative mixtapes. Set in the speculative locale of The Palace of Humming Trees, the poem is a jaunt through weird nature’s arc of glass, following the desire lines of hyperfoxes, sunburst melancholia and corona correspondence. Also available as a free pdf.
The Luna Erratum (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.
‘The Rosarium’ for Zoee’s album, Flaw Flower (Illegal Data)
A lyric sequence responding to the glistening pop garden of Zoee’s debut record Flaw Flower. Available as an A6 booklet as part of the limited edition album bundle.
The Palace of Humming Trees with Jack O’Flynn and Katie O’Grady (French Street Studios)
A collaborative project with artist Jack O’Flynn and curator Katie O’Grady which took place April to August 2021 and was showcased at French Street Studios in Glasgow. Featuring new works of poetry, sculpture, illustration and multisensory dreamscapes (from mixtapes to Tarot readings), we offered a ‘tenderly crumbling foliage’ of visual and sonic otherworlding.
The Dream Turbine with A+E Collective and The NewBridge Project
This online installation explores the relationship between sustainability and dreaming, offering a space to collectively share dreams and promote discussions surrounding these broader topics. The Dream Turbine was conceived by A+E Collective in collaboration with Niomi Fairweather and Jessica Bennett, as part of the Overmorrow Festival. I contributed to a preparatory DreamPak of resources and the curation of a Dream Vault and associated ‘Lost in the Dreamhouse’ workshop on Zoom.
Cauliflower Love Bike Episode 1: Play with A+E Collective
While play might be co-opted for capitalism, true play is that which exceeds instrumentalism and commodification. This episode reclaims play from its dialectical relation with work, exploring play as a practice and thought-mode that is capable of radical sensing, temporal sabotage, tenderness, sociality and a joyous excess that is also low-carbon. The podcast series was launched at COP26 in the Rachel Carson Centre’s pop-up exhibition at New Glasgow Society.
Article: ‘Hypercritique: A Sequence of Dreams for the Anthropocene’ in Coils of the Serpent Issue 8
An in-depth venturing through the possibilities of hypercritique, featuring readings of Billie Eilish, Sophia Al-Maria, Ariana Reines and more; plunging through dream, fire and the heartwood of anthropocene imaginaries.
“Just to distract you like the inside”: a correspondence wrapped up in Bernadette Mayer’s poetry, in post45, Bernadette Mayer cluster (with Colin Herd)
An epistolary collaboration which wraps and unwraps itself in and around the poetry of Bernadette Mayer, as part of a special cluster issue on Bernadette’s work.
‘I, Cloud: Staging Atmospheric Imaginaries in Anthropocene Lyric’, Moveable Type, Issue 13
Tracing the possibilities of ‘cloud writing’ in anthropocene lyric by way of Brian Eno, Mary Ruefle, Anna Gurton Wachter and more, asking what kinds of reading are possible or desirable in a medial world of thick atmospheres.
‘On Foam’ for Futch Press
Feature: Some Letters – a correspondence with Joe Luna
Review: Cloud Cover, by Greg Thomas
Feature: “It’s pretty utopian!” A conversation with Marie Buck, Mau Baiocco and Maria Sledmere pt.1, pt. 2
SPAM Cut: ‘I RESEARCH THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN ROSE AND DISCOVER’ by Sarala Estruch
Feature: Some Notes on Muss Sill by Candace Hill
Feature: A conversation with Kinbrae and Clare Archibald ‘Tangents: letters on Etel Adnan’: a correspondence with Katy Lewis Hood in MAP Magazine (part 1) (part 2) (part 3)
‘‘Now now is everything’: Maria Sledmere on two maximalist poets of the Anthropocene’, Poetry London issue 99
‘Cloud Shifts’ BlueHouse Journal
Anam Creative Launch for MAP Magazine
Cover for Katy Lewis Hood’s Bugbear (Veer2)
Cover for fred spoliar’s With the Boys (SPAM Press)
Cover for SPAM Press Season 5 Pamphlet series

You’ve got a nerve to be embodied. Lana says it pains her how good the male vocals are on ‘Dealer’. Season of frivolous spending I call you from the floor of a mall, you spend £16.90 on coffee, I don’t know what prose is.
At some point I must have remembered the password to the room of amphibians, Analysis.
It’s not like the contact is there. A plate of sliced ham many decades ago, the puppy ate. A palate refined into podcasters who go out for cheeseburgers, murmuration of commas, choleric entropies. It’s a form of sleep paralysis. Horny letters to environmentalists.
Save me…as…
You lucid dream or you stop / shall it be blessed to touch the furnace a hard-light, the caterpillar blonde.
The door is locked. It needs a medicine. Rivers of cognac coagulate arterial: one is gold, one is white. Nightmares of Fancy prose. Aperitif or signet ring. Solid aura.
The barista gifts me free lemon cake “for someone that needs it” and it might be me or I half it with you? All canal walk I sipped the glow of that coffee their human kindness
The city a hologram out of Musk’s Eye™️
Sharing our name with the semblance of oatmeal, remembering for the business of hibiscus. It’s not as if I don’t want to say sky leaf, high staples, the charcoal nights of London. The bars are still apparently ours, a sensibility measured by flood vibe. Names of boats.
I can’t listen to music it’s all ships. The pillow faults of true music. Soundcloud was a planet. Salad Daze. Salad translates leaf array, a contour irrealism, swarm economics, morbid blonde. Wafer arrangements of transistor radio.
A feedback loop of the dark. The edifice of gelatine.
Time goes off like a triangle.
Photoelastic buoyancy; saline; bone; lime.
Nearby they are sleeping so I am the night elf
I miss tinsel I want so much tinsel I want Porphyria’s Lover erotica tinsel I want to be metaversed into the scintillant realm of tinsel a mass effect class tinsel I want blonde tinsel a gold physiology I want reddish the trad version tinsel ikr
Silvering with these destroyer lawyers
What was the original chipmunk music?
tinsellllllllllllllling total tinsel insensate a hard sell 🙂
I sue you!
Remember the xmas we listened to psychology podcasts as we hung gold baubles on the natural tree I wept in the eighties before sun lamps were invented
Remember me, I was a product
🐀🐚🌫️☕🌹🧜♀️🌚😭🥑💧❄️🍋⭐🤯🚆💋👻🪟🛒🚲💭🦋😶🌫️🌱🍫🍒🌶️🪴🍻🚦🤸♂️⛳🏔️🌳🎠🔅🪞💎⚡💊🩸🧊➿🌬️🕛❤️🔥🥶🔗🌷📚🌀🍄🥃🧶🪲🦠🔇

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.
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. 🙂