Category: literature

New book: Cinders

I’ve been excited about this for a long time: my U.S. debut and new poetry collection, Cinders, is forthcoming with KRUPSKAYA Books!

I started writing Cinders in 2019. In some ways, this feels like the most worked-through, shape-shifting and elemental thing I’ve written. It’s also a bit crazy, let loose, poet in residence at the wind farm energy.

Its main epigraphs are these:

About the book

Cinders is a perverse and hybrid reimagining of Jacques Derrida’s 1987 book of the same name and the rags-to-riches fairy tale, Cinderella, set against anthropocene mythoscapes of deep time, haunted leisure plazas and terraformed Mars.

Cinders retells an old tale about lateness–how late is it, is it too late, what are the stakes of being too late if it is too late. This lateness, in Sledmere’s visionary lyric poems, pervades the structures and strictures of the pop dystopias and erotic utopias she studies: gender, class, geography, space–inner and outer. The very elements of Cinderella that were there all along as the wood burned to ash in the hearth.

Jeff Clark of the amazing Crisis Studio did a really great job on the cover, which has an accidental nod to the drapery of Cixous’ Hyperdream (one of my favourite books in the world) and whose ash curls are from a real incident of burning the avatar of the tale herself.

I am grateful to Sophie Collins, Colin Herd and Douglas Pattison for reading earlier drafts, and to Brandon Brown, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Stephanie Young for being such amazing, enthusiastic and thorough editors ❤

Here are some nice things people have said about the book:

Voilà! There she flies! Cinders! Sledmere’s ribboning red hot femme lyric avatar neither yet soot nor fire, always already hearthless, always already combustible, floating out on the thermals of volatile, flammable, scorching lyrics, trailing clouds of glorious derridean cinder-signals. Imagine lying with Plath’s red-haired Lady Lazarus and Celan’s ashen-haired Shulamith, moon-eyed sisters in anthropocene’s burned-out basement, knowing we are stardust, golden, indeed carbon, but with no way back to the garden and only high contempt for the billionaire boys’ silver spaceships in that yellow haze of the sun (‘this isn’t the journey’)—who do we call? Who ‘singing this tale of the comet’ is going to ‘come for you, little/ burning world’? Cinders! There she flies! Voilà! Poetry coming out of her like lava. Read it, sisters, and swoon. Now listen for that glass slipper to drop then splinter.
— Jane Goldman

Maria Sledmere sneaks up on you. In language that is deceptively intimate and often playful she limns a world of dark, sharp corners, where ecological catastrophe no longer looms but makes itself felt in every aspect of daily life. Intricate and expansive, never alighting on the expected, the poems in Cinders are both gems and bombs. A subtle stunner of a book.
— Anahid Nersessian

The book’s publication date is 12th February 2024, just in time for Valentine’s. Please get in touch with the publisher if you would like to review, stock or whatever!

Some poems in the book have been published already in places including trilobite and the Pilot Press anthology, Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) (2022).

Preorder here!

The Zone


 
Hello it’s dark down here like a deck of cards
or a memoir
I don’t know how I got to the deep sweet part of the year
it’s not like heavenly bubblewrap beginning again
unboxed study of presence
I was a higher monstrosity before all of you
paroxysmal the actress had weird nipples
that’s not why the film moved me so much 
I loved the psychosis of numbers
falling in love with them
close your eyes and count down from ten
on a bike in traffic
like tulip for a tongue 
everyone will love you 
on the count of zero 
calorie infinity 
this year we got so sick
crying over ourselves in bathtubs of colder water 
we were too wet in our minds 
for god to slice machine language
I learned to sleep like a baby
which is to say cryingly
I learned to sleep like a dead man
playing dead with microdosed indifference
to the way it breathes
I’m not blowing up rumours of balloon 
with my labour
the university can engineer balladry funding 
like the man who made millions from his gold rush ballads
made more from the ballads than the gold 
I learned this while bowling
I am terrible at bowling
the way a heavy weight slings from my arm 
the let go 
of holding each other in public
pieces of art gallery candy arranged by the window 
a hundred storeys high 
above sea level 
at maximum emotional altitude
today it’s not going to get any lighter 
I won’t feel tender towards a petty
listener monologue of the star 
topping forest
says go harder fly faster 
in the face of despair
don’t spit 
the gallery candy 
fungible in glib ways like on eBay
buying up the tears of Britney 
who danced with knives on reels
available to anyone
 
 
 

wrote this on christmas day

Snowkiss 

There’s no need to be afraid this Christmas
the landlords are all gone home to their mums
in outer suburbia we can’t get 
turkey, mistletoe or snow on credit 
any more than poetry will get us
into the club of our dreams on the bus
gone very hot and fast to bed instead
with the new living elves of a breadline 

Grown livid in labouring pains for kids
at the sonnet workshop wanting to sit 
on the same old future’s necrotic knee
would it not be lovely to make a bid
adoring sentiment this counterfeit
O kisses of ownership set us free

Books I read in 2023

Disclaimer: this list is probably missing a ton of really good poetry pamphlets that are in my room somewhere, sorry.



Gabby Bess, Alone with Other People (2013)

Charles R. Cross, Heavier than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain (2001)

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962)

Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form (2020)

Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of New York City (1999)

Hannah Weiner, Hannah Weiner’s Open House (2006)

Penelope Lewis and RA Page (eds), Spindles: Stories from the Science of Sleep (2015)

Kerry Hudson, Lowborn (2019)

Rose Ruane, This is Yesterday (2021)

Bernadette Mayer and Greg Masters, At Maureen’s (2013)

Nina Mingya Powles, Tiny Moons (2019)

Maggie O’Sullivan, murmur: Tasks of Mourning (2011)

Nina Mingya Powles, Small Bodies of Water (2021)

Tom Raworth, Removed for further study: the poetry of Tom Raworth (2003)

Torrey Peters, Detransition Baby (2021)

Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy (2017)

Nadia de Vries, Know Thy Audience (2023)

Savannah Brown, Closer Baby, Closer (2023)

Suzanna Slack, White Spirit Videotelephony (2023)

Suzanna Slack, Luxury Profile (2021)

Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010)

Jessie Widner, Interiors (2022)

Aaron Kent & John Welson, Requiem for Bioluminescence (2022)

Christiane F., Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (1978)

Kaisa Saarinen, Weather Underwater (2023)

Fern Brady, Strong Female Character (2023)

Felix Bernstein, Notes on Conceptual Poetics (2015)

Rosemary Mayer, Ways of Attaching (2022)

Shehzar Doja, Let Us (Or, the Invocation of Smoke) (2023)

Will Harris, Brother Poem (2023)

Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience (2023)

Maggie O’Sullivan, murmur: tasks of mourning (2011)

Taylor Strickland, Dastrum/Delirium (2023)

Andrew Durbin, Skyland (2020)

Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life (2002)

Savannah Brown, Closer baby closer (2023)

Gareth Farmer, KERF (2022)

Ian Heames, Sonnets (2023)

Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds (2010)

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (1997)

Samantha Walton, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (2021)

Stephanie LaCava, I Fear My Pain Interests You (2022)

Zara Butcher-McGunnigle, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life (2021)

Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less (2022)

Dana Ward, Some Other Deaths of Bas Jan Ader (2013)

Rob Halpern, Hieroglyph of the Inverted World (2021)

Eugene Ostashevsky and Galina Rymbu, F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (2020)

Amy Key, Arrangements in Blue (2023)

bell hooks, All About Love (2000)

gentian meikleham, Kare Hansen, Sofia Archontis, Ruby Lawrence, William Knox, Meredith Macleod, Leonie Staartjes, Brave Dog (2023)

Tom Betteridge, Dog Shades (2023)

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love (1993)

Johanna Hedva, Your Love is No Good (2023)

Tom Raworth, Earn Your Milk (2009)

Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts (2007)

Robert Creeley, The Charm (1969)

Briony Hughes, Milk (2023)

Eduoard Louis, History of Violence (2016)

Eileen Myles, A “Working Life” (2023)

Daniel Alexander Jones, Love Like Light (2021)

Ivy Allsop, purge fluid (2022)

Stephanie Young, Ursula or University (2013)

Kristin Ross, The Politics and Poetic of Everyday Life (2023)

Jarvis Cocker, Good Pop Bad Pop (2022)

Alice Notley, The Speak Angel Series (2023)

Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing (2022)

Christina Chalmers, Subterflect (2023)

Suzanna Slack, gummizone (2023)

Greg Thomas, Candle Poems (2023)

Julia O’Toole, Heroin: A true story of drug addiction, hope and triumph (2005)

Kristine McKenna and David Lynch, Room to Dream (2018)

Lee Ann Brown and Bernadette Mayer, Oh You Nameless and Unnamed Ridges (2022)

Isabel Waidner, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023)

Laynie Browne, Intaglio Daughters (2023)

Naomi Klein, doppelgänger (2023)

Elisabeth Roudinesco and Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow…: A Dialogue (2001)

J. R. Carpenter, An Ocean of Static (2018)

Alan McGee, Creation Stories (2013)

Jackie Wang, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (2023)

Sarah Schulman, Girls, Visions & Everything (1986)

Hélène Cixous, Manhattan, trans. by Beverly Bie Brahic(2007)

Antonio Tabucchi, Requiem: A Hallucination, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (1994)

Bernadette Mayer, Another Smashed Pinecone (1998)

Readings in New York, Dec 2023

I am going to be in New York(!) for a few days in December, doing some readings with a motley crew of Scottish poets: Colin Herd, Jane Goldman, Iain Morrison, Nicky Melville.

So far, confirmed events are:

Sunday 17th, 12-3pm – Scottish Poetry Brunch at Torn Page. RSVP.

Monday 18th, 6:30-8pm – Poetry: A Christmastime Gathering with Four Scottish Poets at Frenchtown Bookshop. More info.

If you have any recommendations of cool things happening between the 16-21st of December in NY, hit me up!

Woundscape

Woundscape is a creative response to Making Imagined Objects, the 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference which happened in Glasgow, June 2022, commissioned by The Alasdair Gray Archive in partnership with Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. This pamphlet has been produced with support from the Scottish Poetry Library’s ‘Poetry Pamphlet Fund’.

Released 4th November 2023
Edition of 100 numbered copies. *
ISBN: 978-1-3999-7021-1

“An introspective set of poetics that sews together the gathering discomfort of the human soul and stretches it out across the urban decay of our crumbling cities. Sledmere is an architect of the atmospheric, the surreal, but captures with a brilliant and delicate undercurrent that singularity of emotion that we can all relate to; the absurdity of our existence. This book is inimitable, a triumph of melancholy raining down upon our weathered streets, where hearts are imprisoned, and all doors are carefully barred.” (Stuart McPherson) 

“Where does poetry go when ‘tomorrow becomes sorer and sorer’? I’d follow it here, to Maria Sledmere’s writing. These brilliant poems encounter familiar woundscapes, from Alasdair Gray on the heart, to the scaffolding and sanctuaries of a city, our civic agonies, and remake the stakes of poetry again. As they meet the ache of bodily enclosures and language, something emerges, like a condition: shared, real and moving, alive. A kind of love poetry perhaps, that knows in its lightness the costs. Fake, hungry and true. ‘To eat/like to read a poem’. Nothing more urgent and fresh than this, ‘going home in the prosody of being sold nothing’. Eat now, before it’s gone.” (Carol Watts)

“A work which is at once meaningfully drawn from Gray’s own Woundscape and very much her own, this response is full of all the vividity, sparky connectivity and sensitivity you’d expect from Maria Sledmere. Never a dull phrase, never a dead word, her Woundscape – ‘disciplined/in the disappearing city/of civic agonies’ – is urgent and arresting.” (Rodge Glass)

“What Maria Sledmere deftly does is extend her prose beyond Gray and the ‘Making Imagined Objects’ event, weaving into it personal interactions, responses to other creatives work (including Louise Bourgeois), digital wanderings and liminal spaces. The result is a layered dreamscape written with a human heart but embodying otherworldly wisdom.” (Sorcha Dallas, Custodian, The Alasdair Gray Archive) 

Now available for preorder via Osmosis Press. ✄ ~ ~ ~ ~

We are launching the pamphlet in Glasgow, at The Alasdair Gray Archive, on 4th November at 2pm. There will also be readings from Robbie White, Scott Hay and Alasdair Watson. Tickets here.