Miss Anthropocene is a selection of short lyric, ‘ethereal nu metal’ poems responding to the Elon Musk/Grimes complex, from intimations of emerald fortunes to billionaire shares, conceptual infinity and big e-girl energy. Through academic research, poetry and music criticism, I’ve been hinging on the ‘miss anthropocene’ project for some years now, and the arrival of Grimes’ 2020 album of the same name, on the brink of pandemic lockdown, was the final impetus to write this. Responding to the record’s conflations of misanthropy and our current geological epoch, Miss Anthropocene explores weird desire, gender, material intimacy, temporal distortion, apocalypse vibrations, pop music and a petropoetics of excess and residue within the frenzied dramaturgy of late capitalism and climate crisis. In lieu of the doom scroll, this is a post-internet ecopoetry of ‘massive dance lament’, lyric survival, surface tension, sexy ambience, dreamplay and visions.
There is a place where these supermassive roses might be planted. A harsh place that exists at thin resolution, we have to resample; I am doing the maths to know how 100gb permits her entrance. The process slows because this behaviour is not natural. Her entrance with the roses bundled in giant’s arms, and the long tresses of foam and seven neat words she has tucked in a satchel of crocheted pea proteins. She is attuned to a certain instant where it works that she plants the roses. They are gnarly, monstrous, thirsty. The roses are not sober. And the girl? She stumbles on her third negroni, abstracted, poured by the silent one who inhabits the hedgerows. Vermouth of sun, gin of moon, aperitif of the bitterwort and marshes, garnished with wedges of orange from overseas. These seven neat words I will not tell you with her lips sealed blood sugar, femme confection, a certain rain, a squall.
The clarity is lost a little when we adjust figures. But the girl is still there, in the corner maybe, bundled from sight with impossible flowers. What do we know of a girl and her flowers? She could be a waitress, a bridesmaid, a funeral attendant — but no, this is extravagance to belie all such professions. The flowers won’t fit in the picture this is. It is not merely to carry. Some say they are hyperobjects, but if so, what of the girl? She is also beyond human proportion; she would live a thousand years. Sprinkle hundreds and thousands of leap years merely upon breakfast, and yet at nineteen does she not look a million? If you were to splay the fine skin between her thumb and forefinger, you would begin to see the star stuff which flows in human capillaries. But at such resolution!
Of her face since nineteen, the narrator of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover [L’Amant] (1984) writes: ‘But my face hasn’t collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste’. So when the girl lay down for another of her size; they were a cloud, it rained, the girl awoke with child. But she gave birth to nothing but roses. She was a fixture of the processing plant. Initially, sealed in mousseline baubles, they were not even roses but rosehips clustered among thorned vines. And you would imagine these vines entwined with her spine, climbing them as if the destiny was always her neck. She would speak at night, tapping the fine glass, warming them as eggs. Give everything away: the rose-meat of petals and their pale, inward jam, hatching saps, their crying.
A cloud always passes, it creases the sky. Cars go in and out at night.
~
The fruit of rose, especially a wild kind when I write of a Mary Sue or brush her teeth, when she is more tall than willow and yet I have set her colours inverse so in reaching for rosehips she must reach into shadow and isn’t that all in the working day of dreams is deferral of Edenic cinema, she grows in wilderness also known as the fortress of lossy compression where trees are shaky with original pixels and her clothes are torn as mine would be crying forever by the sea with my dairy allergy for twilight ‘The blues are because you’re getting fat and maybe it’s been raining too long’ and if she is me then I am she rehearsing definitions for litany via prayer, supplication, complaint am I a melt vector on cutting board you call me aslant with the knife tucked close to cupid’s bow of my lips ‘she was noted for her command of dialogue’ but no one said anything lipsticks: sweet chestnut, amarena red tender rose and orange delight shaking the rosehips all night for Roman god of erotic love is just rare labour of the shepherds in pleasantview, saying sorry or what colour your blouse is, mine is damask you could press to make attar so I know how I love is mother puts glitter on a wreath of ivy and dying hydrangeas to hang on the door, entrance Mx I give you generally acceptable apples the shop called jazz, they are wrapped in plastic we look up to see the planets ‘almost touching’ but they are something else entirely easy, lucky or free. These green diamonds don’t occur in the wild; she makes them from slices of apple glitch effect plumbob oil of rose is condensation a playable simulation novelist in decline as I lick the sea wall cast this upwards to where another hour is ravished you start to read.
PART TWO: SACRED PORRIDGE
Perhaps this would be enough of the rose-girl if she would stop haunting me. I dreamed Bernadette Mayer wrote a novel overnight, it was midsummer, she was 27 and had a fountain pen the size of the Eiffel Tower. Tell me what she was smoking, was it Marlboro or lemongrass? Maybe cloves? I get mixed up, I’m darks and pastels, nobody likes me. Open a beer to share regardless / Crude oil streams from her words. I became suspicious the rose-girl was a fiction of Bernadette’s, that I was stuck in the internet fiction and whittled away. There was a poem called ‘Thorn’ about a penis. Brexit or no Brexit, I was anyway hoarding tins of beans in the hope they would get me somewhere – a similar purpose to breakfast. Recite to me from memory these stats about lactose, creatine, muscle enhancement. I lift my arms to reach you, I am hauled to the new wall painted mint to match the green iris tea of your eyes, it’s Greenwich Park / I am spent with apple pips and cauliflower hallways. I want to be hurled across continents sprightly / put acorn in pocket. I am not her but she is me, here, in a harsh place. You are the smoothest nut! What was the novel? I don’t know, I have this line: ‘the negative capability of raisins’. Don’t kill the squirrels! Sunday you make porridge with peanuts, sour cream, biscuit, honey, drops of chocolate, muscovado sugar, extra milk of oat – why not acorns? The rose-girl watches. Her breath is a draught.
She is so huge you would miss her. All December the faint scent of her pea satchel follows me so I know I couldn’t possibly have corona. Plunge my nose in vegetal folds. I would be the aura of plasma around her sun, that’s all and merely. Does it rot? The size of these roses, really, is impossible to measure. Expect several hundred metres or miles, stumbling in the world of error where we go to buy bread. Is it for months you have been a tile, a talking head? You are very delicate and I stroke your nice hair, which loosens through the screen to meet me waterfall. I climb to the top of the beanstalk we braided from eating well. We read Lee Harwood in the rain, As Your Eyes are Blue, and drink mulled wine. I guess I am riding horses to catch up with the size of these roses, blue ones also, fat and mellow. Jackie Wang calls this ‘outlaw jouissance’; a phrase I wrote in my notebook, quickly. The line gets whipped! I think about Cy Twombly. The horses are all kinds of colours, but mostly the pearlescence of inside seashells, or mollusc aurora’d in a way that seems Björk or genital. I suppose the rose-girl arranges them nightly as saints do, genial; I suppose it is like Sylvanian families. Sometimes from copses of rowans, the tops of the miniature or minotaur trees, red-berried painted I read her SylviaPlath. My poison voice must catch the wind exact, ‘The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea / And comes from a country far away as health’, as health shall be a human dimension, unrhymed, the rose-girl considers. She is the only one of us who has seen a corpse flower, in a third-floor apartment where somebody important had smuggled the seeds from Chicago, where was she. The corpse flower is not a singular flower but a cluster of blooms, and so is she. It all stinks, I say, so I don’t have corona. If you touch the flanks of these horses so smooth your hands will vanish in gossamer, they become other materials, still smell like hay. This viscosity to friction feels good, it’s lush with endorphins — why don’t you try it. The water is warmly you and me, like the sea; it comes from the eyes of the rose-girl, crying.
~
There’s still time to shop, you collect from store towards a possible come on let’s go of the literal it stings, who you would be in the dream not the enemy’s eye or the unripe banana I stayed in bed til mid-afternoon writing feel-thesis, correcting citations of Clarice Lispector it’s Christmas, you know I don’t have corona on the phone to Avanti the songs are played in such intervals of 45 seconds as to make you hate the very nature of a chord progression is desire’s deferral and will you secure a seat for us at motion sickness what is necessity feels like Velocity is I am washing my hair with tar shampoo and cider vinegar. Come close, wish soon, revese December. Should I call someone? It might be you, explaining multiplication to me, you carry the one and the two, and then I never do read my old diaries smelling of blood and sleep deprivation acrid bulimia, spray of A7 garlic mussels, scarlet muscles my brother says he will donate his plasma for medical causes, have I fear of needles? Lady bird shell collect bathroom dust, antibodies, I am clean and typeset like the stars. You open my coat because of this Reynauds, too cold to unbutton. My anhedonia is cyclical, I stick little poems to the wall they go like
once upon a midnight weary came the lovers on a ferry they were drunk and very old but never had they had a cold over the hills and overseas they could be you or even me
It’s like the Friday of 2019 I read Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant journals from low-res pdf festive darkness crying in trashland and couldn’t stop tasting purple for a week of otherwise phantosmia, what I smelled was the crushed illustrious rose of infinity pinned to my bittersweet nasal cavity as I am to watch corpse flower time-lapse resemble green diamond, they erect an umbrella and a rare titan arum bloom beneath you typing at the library am I bike spoke, a concept strike for closing the erstwhile windows? Click to know mood… We keep going We leap in a pool of pure negroni and my lungs keep coming up blossom of orange and call you “Hey everyone welcome back to the room, you can open your eyes now” Like probably I have told you before about the band I am starting, a synth-punk deathcore revivalist outfit called Yoga with Adriene I have her permission, she says May all beings be happy Move from a place of connect Present and awake Love your neighbour Things get better, they have to It’s a revolution of the muscular laxation of the life you find cored If you have apple belly thick-skinned of futurity, there will be a chorus and verse for this that goes like scream Motive, Trust, Floor, High, Kindle, Salve, Soften, Strength & Harmony My thighs are burning brightly, it’s the end friend of my Norwich or Brighton, Manchester, Glasgow and some kind of New York resemblance is ‘cracking America’ at the top of your list I have never been to the south coast of an average celestial body yet watering your houseplants I won’t go viral in the night with pills and tweets There’s no cheating in yoga, you make it your own as I do cartwheels on a leap day of acid comedown they say I do it too fast the flight gets in and distant cat miaows as I do kiss you a lot they say catharsis is found in the blues and green laps up the rest is stretching if you can only find it like the sweet spot asana with arm across chest I am become rowan tree, flexing queen of the prom you pluck fruit pastilles from inside me the sea, first try is easy.
PART THREE: TENDER ALPHABET
A. will write in the time of commute B. prefers spearmint toothpaste C. is inside of me D. the size of Paris cumulus E. is all you can eat, ecstasy F. who I love G. has grown H. the hendecasyllabic I fail to write I. doesn’t rightly exist J. sends endless emails K. is a joke L. for loosening jewellery M. with dark sweet cherries and doubles N. conspicuous passionate weekend O. checks the notification P. of classical pleasure Q. minds the gap R. is a rising rat-souled singer S. supposes the cognitive deficit T. exists in lyric saloon U. then driving me up the highway V. to frangible lust I am W. of shimmer lamb X. into cowbell rhythms we go Y. yellow warning of wind has been issued Z. is a property of citrus
PART FOUR: FLOWER SHOW
In The Besieged City (1948) by Clarice Lispector, ‘the flower was showing off […] it too was untouchable, the indirect world’, ‘exhausted’, ‘What is the flower made of if not of flower itself’.
OPEN LOOP ( BOUQUET ( ) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ) )
The flower exclaimed a soft orchestral impression of breathing. Adults no longer snack in movies. Spent five hours on a train, six on Zoom, three in the outside air is nice. A time-lapse corpse flower, the music being used, pace of light. Heat syncope of the sea, we dive. Someone is hired to recover her pearls or pears. My skin is peeling from sanity gels.
A fault language of shiningly happy teenagers. Rosettes for the nuclear pony. It’s all total showers today. Condensery of lemonade gemstone, sertraline, the lapwing massacre in a Sufjan track / so I am endlessly sorry.
PART FIVE: NATAL SMUDGE
When everything started to wilt, the moon was too late. Untouchable stem of a name, yet the rose-girl knew what to do. She swallowed the world like a gobstopper, a lightbulb, a tulip. The arrogance of sundown was only that it knew how to try.
Turning over, see the supermassive rose in her belly.
Superstitious gemstones include violets and opals, sleepflower, nightshade; don’t @ me if you think they are cruel or kind. Marlene drops cranberries from the wall and you piss twice as hard in Scarborough Fair, are you sad, buy me blue cheese, there is vigilance in the dead. Rosemary for memory, thyme for a life you led, who sells it. Marlene says she misses Alisha, that’s not-me. Pray you arrive here safely, smudge of tarragon, mushroom photography, lines of flight.
We, after Sophie, after Frank, say Ask for everything!
Regarding conjunction, something about publishing, spirituality, knowledge and authority figures. There will be tension with Aquarius principle. A slip of paper. I was born at 06:20, in a thunderstorm.
[Oh yes! x]
The rose-girl had an overture: she tore wedding pearls from her branch-sized clavicle, let them scatter from the tub where she lay and the tub was a cloud, the pearls were snow. At the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, she was a divorce child with her hair in two plaits we would climb up to kiss at the nape of her neck, that’s it, I play all my aces so we won’t die. These cards are beautiful, we turn them away. There will be no dying, not here or now. I thresh the rest of my skyluck, lager, my skylark. I’m lucky the mirror is showing up nowhere. Sometimes it is Freud’s voice, or an oil pastel. The foam from her brushed-down hair. Of the past you have given me everywhere, Andromeda, minipops, electronic renaissance. In writing the poem I am playing the cello, I am playing the cello of poem to death, why not?
It’s up to you It’s down to you
Don’t be so mournful…
PART SIX: SCENTED AND GENEROUS
I had a dream about the diary with the days mixed up. Each day had its own fragrance:
Cognac, cannabis, dill pickle, mown grass, libido enhancer, sweet vanilla, jasmine, ylang ylang, who shares all, heart notes of shrub, blackcurrant, oak moss, popcorn, peppermint candy, lavender, ginger castoreum, chypre, neroli, understory, wooded and tonka, ambery, orris, top note, emily brontë rose, cinnamon, hot shit, gold dust, brine of ocean, roast aubergine cologne near airstrip pheromone, oil pipe explosion, special cinders, vetiver, slots into psyche, balsam, absinthe, cassie, frangipani, saffron, strawflower aka immortelle, black liquorice, lactones, myrrh, sassafras, fruit loops, chocolate ice, pamplemousse or french for grapefruit martini and rockrose, peony, tobacco, peppercorn, petitgrain, scottish myrtle and soft fir, nutmeg, new car, coffee brew, pine needles, indole, musk of course.
Pitseleh means little one. Elliott Smith sings, ‘no one deserves it’.
I’m turning a petal to see you better / that I am someone’s difference.
Dear Alisha,
If we were to wed in the childhood memory where you circle the prairie with diet cola and you always know what to do, I see the cherryade reds in you, sanguineous of first degree and alacrity pitching your letter. The post office is closed. I eat more peanut butter than Elvis and nobody stops me, I get it from Aldi. The day feels closure and we edge towards lockdown, I’m texting, Starbucks is open on Christmas Day, will you bring me something? Again, like the time we ordered starlit capitalist fuck lattes and dusted methamphetamine before shift; we were exquisite, fruit toast, the nourishing glitter in our hair was ace; we served 200 covers, sixty quid in tips, and you were scarlet in the uniform poem called A Scarlet Letter. Not the one or the many, just any. I knew this already. We had written them all! You have to have dashes of green to make red, tell Hilary, which is why I am writing to you from my rowan tree, fred asks is this a rowan bush, I say a rosehip, I don’t know what to do; the inchplant is coming up fast, it will ingest the television, I look forward to it. Brockley Station, Nina Simone, stomach cramps, star flood. Must learn how to climb / the branches brightly.
Write to me of conspicuous passions, such as aging, or the fairy fountain with permissible agelessness. Crystal arpeggio. The various glacés of Rome, ornamental corpse flowers, pistachio and your deep, carnal desire to dance. I brush all the sea-foam from the rose-girl’s hair and she would collapse in panic. What the heck is in this carpet. Can you send me again the dimensions, dots per inch in terms of the plant, or planet? There is much to do. I am sewn a yellow word and kissing you cherries to lemonade, black to blues. Needing earth for it, rich stuff, thoughts on allotments. Omnidawn is the word, when the camera pans out and one million people have streamed this song, the credits come up. O blush, Love’s refrain in summer! 500,000 ampersands, can you imagine it? My new grand dreams of porny conjunction…
You taught me how to shoplift the various accessories of girlhood; I’ve given it up. See how my brows disapprove!
December is cruel, the dark green foliage of tinsel and shrubbery, poinsettias, it’s kitsch. I learn a blue-grey song on guitar but it sucks. Mum makes paella for xmas eve etc. Pantone named yellow-grey the colours of 2021, Katy is raging as I might too; I had a poem about this from before f-sharp, it was all about cycling, snapped ankles, absolute melt. Get to you. The way you arc your arms just so is centrepiece: everything will be the same as the sum of it was, serving us dinner. Cryptocurrency, wrong-name, Tony Blair of bad air was trending, you do it last-minute, pronounce it soft, you wear a blue velour lace thing, fka misty. These are the suburbs where doors were slammed, and these were offered cookies. Fuck a lawn. But you dip your feet in scant oasis, you break off a piece of the dark chocolate donut. I have dreamed of this. Stillnesses are not without purchase. Another spam mail arrives, dear pal—
I am going out to buy us blowsy hours, belong and casual distortion. Black forest gateau and log of the roasted poem, emitting steamiest lines, pleasure days, no breaks just ganache is that thick language. We lay together, birthday of shadow work, wrote sunlessness. I draw dark green liner on their eyes like vines. Wish holidays longer. We enter the alone wood with natural lights they are strung they are simple, leafage pressed between them. 1800 dpi, virus gone, unmute the sea. You are warmly invited.
~
Mermaid Chunky – Gemini Girls
‘Til Tuesday – Voices Carry
God Help the Girl – Down and Dusky Blonde
Sunflower Bean – Moment in the Sun
Phoebe Bridgers – Graceland Too
M83 – Karl
Tomberlin – Hours (Katie Dey remix)
Gia Margaret – apathy
Felicia Atkinson, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – And The Flower Have Time For Me
Friends, I was so close to not doing one of these this year, but my bad case of archive fever was too strong to resist. For the first time since the depressive loops of my early 2010s, I’ve really struggled with music this year. Yo-yo’d between extremely intense relations to music (listening to Grimes’ ‘IDORU’ three times in a row in spring’s post-cycle endorphin twilight, crying to Mogwai in the supermarket, thrash dancing to old Boiler Room sets alone in my bedroom, knocking everything over, basically living inside Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Garden Song’) and a very numb sense of trepidation about listening altogether. Have gone whole weeks without listening to anything except ’10 hours sounds of a meadow in june’ on youtube. Have gone whole months without noticing new releases. Music has anchored the year in strange ways. I think about the man in my block who kept singing/screaming Oasis’ ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’ in the shared garden, and did this several times throughout lockdown 1.0. I was so concerned. Boards of Canada albums I fell into, haphazardly studying. The conditions of lockdown, not to mention PhD and other pressures, have slowed down my output of published music writing, but I continued to diarise my listening habits and it was a pleasure to write on occasion for GoldFlakePaint, Secret Meetingand other places on new releases from Jason Molina, Phoebe Bridgers, Katie Dey, Superpuppet, Fair Mothers, Modern Studies. As ever, you can dive into the music journo archive here.
What follows is a selection of albums I’ve managed to dip in and out of, form some kind of bond with or which otherwise stayed with me. One of music’s main attractions this year was its provision of sociality: whether through late-night Instagram DMs or seeing everyone’s Spotify listening (pale vicarious experience of sonic simultaneity as commons), running Pop Matters workshops with the inimitable Conner Milliken or losing myself in heartfelt comment sections, music was a kind of touchpoint for contact when other kinds of talk or response seemed impossible. That you could screenshare FKA twigs’ ‘Cellophane’ video and all silently hold in tears while free-writing together on Zoom, that you could send some kind of bedroom performance to a friend when words were scarce, that you could buy stuff for Bandcamp Fridays and feel like you were doing *something* for artists while our livelihoods were otherwise being stripped away by lockdowns, recession and endless government (in)decisions. That you could send lyrics in acts of solidarity. That you could sit round a fire in the Trossachs and listen to ‘Farewell Transmission’ with smoke in your eyes or be in Hackney with a heatwave and Lucinda Williams; that you could cycle past psych buskers on Kelvin Way, or lie on the floor with Grouper recordings from 2018; that you could breeze down Sauchiehall listening to ‘Gasoline’ in a world without cars; that you were lucky enough to see your cousin, Hannah Lou Clark, play The Hug and Pint before lockdown; that you could micro-analyse Angel Olsen remixes with Douglas, lamenting another postponed gig or remembering an old one; that you could walk yourself into autumn melancholy with Grace Cummings, longing for the wind and sea; that you could read Amy Key’s excellent essay on Joni Mitchell’s Blue and remember the first of January, sober as a trembling bell and listening on repeat as everything refused to wake, and wine. Admittedly, I may have missed many significant things. Tell me!
Lioness chained to hillsides of lavender the sun is streaming oversea entirely conceptual homeland 5G howl like how a fractal glint constitutes one or more endings and is just never never never never never lavender exactly who unimaginable loses when fox does borrowed snouts language of flowers fuck this howl again five dimensions
Is you said to me a common placard stands vantablack in the manacles jason cries his heart broke in your jaw I swam all night to the motor show roseate perfume of the problem being born out of lobster wedlock to be ravaged by the neo-marxist programme of naming us wasp and other wasp sadnesses it is for me as I for you better at swiss twilight when I was community
In the womb wept effort of what insomnia does from the latin meaning wandering policy of “rural lust” I will swim I will swim through hedgerows I will swim I swim this isn’t the song turn up your sleeves we enter the chess in brightness mode I wanted the heat the reat skelped by autofictive descent another coxcomb texts you back O lariat
At that altitude paying the rent in pale world and even if she has lost control what a car does in green light heaven obscenity pedestrian the ground here opal silicate owing you a crush moratorium cheques out after all this is just a modern rock song adjusting styles pane of my old wound, new wound at clydebank the skycastles at four o’clock who are u
Harvest season was accordion sonnetry I lifted my volta skirts for assholes feeling perennially strange in melancholy chord progression of certified orange is this out of the question lazily in the grass lexie and cecil and ariel open your mouth be lucid corduroy when stevie sings harmony on thursday morning exhaustion I thought just swish would do it
Could be 1995 how will I get there painting the ice- course with fairways is all that I have boygirlboygirl varieties of noodles bunny calls it cloudheartedness be mute in serious leaf together is falling the same as time at all / it got claws hi can I have some more bourgeois heroine pastry
Okay to just swim and arrive here my salty fiancé is a type of fish did you enjoy The Shape of Water and other films to which I might fuck glitching in the real world darling is a missing numbering merely the sun streaming feminine voices never never a century of the Laurieston & all of my guinnesses are oxygen saw another fox
And wherever you are I suppose the squirrels are listening as bartender came home w/ three crystal ocean we stub the ashes out we stub the ashes out it’s him that I am smashed mezzanine phoning my dad big blue energy another song about the suburbs / mineral & gem sometimes I can’t believe
Red lions and lionesses are not metaphors but love laura no lies & lilac passion in the first place I wrote about you in my notebook: we might not even be awake in the worldis still in the kitchen scratch at my socialist lichen second paramore whose kisses are madness my counsellor said yeah I like those mornings also London fog, London fog
~
Oneohtrix Point Never — I Don’t Love Me Anymore
i_O — Castles In The Sky
Quirke — Luxury Red Pence
Mogwai — Dry Fantasy
Salem — Red River
Songs: Ohia — Lioness
Silver Jewels — Federal Dust
Johnny Flynn — Lost and Found
Keaton Hensen — Ontario
Life Without Buildings — Sorrow
Drop Nineteens – Winona
The National — Dark Side of the Gym
Weyes Blood — A Certain Kind
Marika Hackman — Playground Love (Air cover)
God Help the Girl — Pretty When The Wind Blows
Porridge Radio — 7 Seconds
Elliott Smith — True Love
A. G. Cook — Beautiful Superstar
Bat for Lashes — Peach Sky
Lemongrass — Sayonara
Tennis — Tender As A Tomb
The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)
Golden Mean — Midnight
Phoebe Bridgers, Rob Moose — Punisher (Copycat Killer Version)
Angel Olsen — New Love Cassette (Mark Ronson Remix)
Belle & Sebastian — This Is Just a Modern Rock Song
For a brief eternity, nobody was fucking anything that already got fucked and that was when the leaf started falling & another then a whole earnestness of them. Fuck. The way to keep strong is being meticulous about noticing clouds and writing shit down I stopped wanting to rain, I’ll fall asleep smoking. I’ll fall asleep smoking in some movie where my brogues are black as the wet night this all was conceived, draw my red curtains away from the moon that Nasa had a claim on and think about salad days, my nails painted trademark Billie Eilish lime. O salad days pacing restaurants, the rain is on; I remember the leaves swept in the door and they too were victims of a fate in their genes, once green. So I took samples and pressed them crisp between Moleskine pages in the sleep dimension, my writing was automatic and sullen, chlorophyllic, squeezed between menus, I was windswept inside it with the beach pouring out it was heavy. File this under the brush, bush, brush it back into language. I listened to the intricate complaints of the shrubs.
*
Between myriad Tuesdays, I became a psychiatrist of seashells, pressed to my ears their exquisite misery.
*
Time was a month of afternoons and then rivers of weeks and the sexual appetite of the hours then none. M. said in emails it all feels like soup. In no time I drink echinacea tea and wait for you in black velvet trousers, my pretzel crossed legs. The black velvet night is missing from other suns. There is no time. My chest is clearing itself of the leaves and a mysterious spore they call viral but is it just metaphor, is it the just continuum of falsehood, heavy as my tongue in your words and letting the owls out is only fake news. A black velvet night full of owls. The way to keep going is smoking at the window notwithstanding the smoke, I mean lean out like me and catch it. Someone drops loneliness pills from high windows, highest, like the song about throwing pieces out a twenty-storey flat…Your browser does not currently recognise any of the video formats available. And yet that song and for the love of bread and jam and here in our crumbling houses. Seedless. My brother does not understand tenement lust, the trend for it, but a tower-block remains in our town. Black velvet surrounds us, slapped between lunar slices cut from the nightmare of twenty-twenty. It isn’t your vision.
*
At five, he would drink all day diluted wine and snort at jellied nature. I love receiving your comments and photos and learning what is an amethyst deceiver and those in history who wanted us killed. If I am held down by world, I had a cold shower and lived in the hades of a woodlands that didn’t belong to me. Smell of tomato all summer in the glow of my window. Smash it all over your clavicles, the insides of your thighs, between your toes, the secrecy of your neck. Flesh of a very red vitamin C. Imagine owning the woodlands. Not to eat, I typeset all night to the sound of sentences, insects, let them lay me down later, I am all this humming snow. What sleep is it that comes three hours at a time, at a time without time that is never quite dark and five hours late. If the clocks go back. You say it’s impossible to write in these times and you are right, as anyone is to say of the impossible I feel it, here and closing in and peeling the skin from my cuticles. Not this. Backwards. When you ask what I’m doing, I’m quietly bleeding. In the hazard assessment, failing to be meticulous is not this. Failing violence. Touching green. I have a good kick at the heart and the head. The men are all down. Held down. You and I get so tired.
*
I want to know how she dies before the novel even opens. Lain down in the grass; the spine is split, our folds are torn. Because you say nothing I go into the orange department and juice my feelings very slowly in rapture. Waking up is to know not what happened. A blade is working in spiral formation – a blade tornado. What would rip us from orange and up, up to our tower block office at home? Dream pith all over the air around us, sticks. Walter Benjamin is very anxious about this, that you should not write dreams down before breakfast, should not attempt to narrate them. You break fast to break with your dreams. I dreamt I wrote copy for an orange juice company, who wanted their ingredients relayed as sonnets. It seemed impossible that orange juice should be so teeming with things other than oranges. The names were beautiful: canola oil, sodium citrate, beta carotene, cellulose, sucralose, Neotame, potassium sorbate, yellow #5, yellow #6 – and what could be seven? What could be less than seven! We are, we are…In the mix, at the end of the nineties, “soft drink turned a girl yellow.” I remember this as though I had been in hospital and the walls were all yellow for how much I stared at the pale and acceptable middle-class blue. Where was this, surely not in the news. I paint my eyes girl yellow, the colour of soft ghosts; I practice quietude, then sugary schemes of rhyme.
*
So what is the meaning of soft in your work, is it ordinary eggshells around the thing itself, is it orange peel, goldfish, autumn maple. I tread lightly on the question of being at all. These terms are so loaded. K. is reading novels where people casually set off fireworks, they do it all the time: they grab them from supermarket bins and set them off in the carpark because why would you wait. A catherine wheel for Asda and my blues is spinning, my blues in the washing machine, O rocket, a felt sense I could hug you then and the blues left a stain on the radiator. Dashes sparkle. We sit in old meadow in mud and the dogs roll over each other. We are not drinking cocktails. The transience of dalmations. What is the meaning of soft. Softness as a kind of value. I wish I could learn precision in language but it goes running over my senses and to be soft is to experience aphasia. Say in the meeting we stammer and get to the question, late morning before this, zoom before zoom, arranging the clattering scale weights and spices. I slept with Bachmann’s Malina under my bed. A blue skirt stain on the radiator. Blue heat rises. Dad says, “have you been listening to seashells again?” I fantasise gas flames.
*
Conch, scotch bonnet, wentletrap, simnia, drill and murex. Rose and sharp-rib, American carrier, Gulf oyster. Marmite mushrooms frying on the stove. You know there is a shell called ‘Coffee bean trivia’. In Brighton you could buy trays of them for a fiver. I bought Guinness instead, a half pint for you and I on the last hot day of the year. There was a kind of listening to sunlight. Softness as what could be damaged inside us: organ spleen, aura lamina, the shell of our bodies. Your cells soft mint as the cure. People are cycling to work; I barely leave my sofa. Various adrenalines assemble inside us. So far the shells have daddy issues because of the sea. Scrub hard and anything shines. I am under the influence of rainbows, umbrellas, a rim of salt.
*
I was fired from the orange department for wearing this blue on my sleeve. In the atrium standing there with Styrofoam coffee, swished blue from my dreams; compliments from the manageress and frowning at the meeting that never would last, and something we didn’t say. ‘Divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions’, writes Jackie Wang. I sat outside Perch and Rest with lemongrass steaming from a cup I had purchased and the leaves blew into my face with rain, they were soft and important, licked and wet.
*
We were about to make love but one of us took concussion from the piece of citrine beneath my pillow.
*
I dreamt rabbits were climbing my beech tree the way goats do in Israel.
*
A small porcelain jug of milk, a blue jug, was all I could glean from the orange department, after my passing. Carried it home in cardboard, I passed through the walls. It is all because the clocks go back and a crack on the wall. Anhedonia, that I hold breadcrumbs and nothing left to imagine. At the late-night snack bar, composing these empty sentences. Do we get paid for the hour we lose? A soft wound is still a wound. “I would like truffle fries, I would like oysters…” This is something I once seriously wondered. Pools of oil in shells, a meltable system. You break crockery and throw it at the sun. It goes like fuck; it is fucking you brightly. There are still exits, listen.
*
Thee Oh Sees – Goodnight Baby
Little Comets – One Night in October
The Cure – Underneath the Stars
Oneohtrix Point Never – ECCOJAMC1
Moses Sumney – Neither/Nor
Massive Attack, Young Fathers – Voodoo in my Blood
and Spicer says, ‘don’t worry I will tell you everything’. this is the dream where you appear as a lime green triangle and there is nothing I can do _ lime green isosceles learning spelling looking at the great internet for hours, very lightly _ lime green isosceles learning your angles /
\ if you appear to me lime again, full-flesh of note
I know a great red splash will appear on the side of the morning, best side, coffee breath not four hours on call, or shepherd style. So how a triangle holds me like every brushstroke, something gestural in lieu of a writerly end. July, july, like who is writing?
(so nice
out of your window the mews were, smoke-warm lung
just one
accident) is a landscape even real? where is my juul, my eye?
There is this line in Katie Dey’s ‘Bearing’ (mydata) which goes, ‘I am warm by her username’.
None of ever disembodied; always a record of brushstroke, beautiful people on the pavement outside and bouncing a trite kind of fungible language, who goes. To shop for that same geometry. It tumbled out of the wow so luminous. this dream I kept having about going for half a Guinness with you / and all pretty drunk on aphid dependence
is jangle
is jangle expensive impressionable air!
look up from the mic it’s there, like yellow flower
went in tesco wearing a mask
felt lux of outside
purchase protect like
there is so much of so little bread in the world
‘But I write
you tomorrow, I always say it in the present’, says Derrida, of a bookleaf letter.
Look who’s shining back, sarments of a username. what is the use value of
removing the bees from the kelvin meadow? sweet carb, sometimes
I am barely iris
growing sideways
and the milk is sour trochee / streak of copper
want to draw us a room to live in
depth of field, dappled motion. Like a ramen hack
all it takes slight pinch of telling you everything. like we camp this close to the website
with duckmice, star anise . . .
growing sideways
that season I got everything early. and it was all good, kind to me
very bloodful much dawn, little saltish, waking only to sleep again to vague
dreamnote will you go
sent up to Parkland or like
a sluice of weather, let me swipe it from yr brow. wild
reclaiming the word for thyme vibration
abundant / gold sounds / this
you is more / Disentangle
prettily the screen again, hair in fist and first / make space for your
space it_ Don’t worry I will tell everything
by the sheen of my wrists a bracelet
of upstroke acoustic lines of steel, latching sun.
Best side, coffee a short breath upon pale-coloured air is how have you slept,
synchronise “morning” for warming, always already
I had that poem about the warm London air and
wanting to kiss us, where did it go
the poem
cut thru a land &
dumb smoke without snow as it was in Glasgow, then
lemon balm smoking a natural data by summerised fountain, four
in the not now morning
O wow like salt lakes
look at us float! no money
you can or can’t say swim
you swap pronoun for leaf
Like
leaf is barely iris
leaf is barely eating
leaf is barely anyone
I was so happy to just say afk : ) breathe me / is only the accidental priceless picnic
of being barely alive like
somebody taking a polaroid, here in my doll’s dress
I-i mean leaf never felt sick as america, except to say sickening!!!! the worry of telling you everything, that’s practice
so much I would crisp by it, hot swear
everything bluegrass
nude in the
locket of
new soft animal shapes
“golden green, red blue”
These are just lights! growing sideways
you pull up slick at the station, leaf coming
before say come
round the corner you
narrate my emails
deleting erotic gasoline, plainsong smelled of triangle
caught you in chord. lime green over Laura Nyro
say what I held in my hand was just
neat spliff
or tiny bird
the heather all over the heather
wild I keep wanting to say it would never go
just about purple
best thing I ever saw or heard
no name of a name
learning to spell say oxeye by the layby
eat three almonds, live in Japan
to jumpstart
liked songs make wonderful life / it’s coming
~
Aye Nako – Sissy
Tacocat – I Hate the Weekend
The Kinks – Rats
Orange Juice – I Guess I’m Just a Little Too Sensitive
R.E.M. – Crush With Eyeliner
CAN – Moonshake
Khruangbin – Time (You and I)
Klein, MONG_WOONG – V3
PJ Harvey, Thom Yorke – This Mess We’re In
U.S. Girls – Rosebud
King Krule – Stoned Again
Sonic Youth – Bull in the Heather
Thee Oh Sees – The Axis
Sun Ra – When There is No Sun
Fire-Toolz – It’s Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer
NNAMDÏ – Glass Casket
Thanya Iyer – Always, Be Together
Christelle Bofale – Moving On, Getting On
Toro y Moi feat. Old Grape God – tron_new_rose_hifi_v2
James Blake – Are You Even Real?
Porridge Radio, Lala Lala – Good For You
Immaterial Possession – Tropical Still Life
Sharon Van Etten – Malibu
Silver Jews – Animal Shapes
Modern Nature – Halo
Fair Mothers, Faith Eliott, Esther Swift – Monochrome
April, the quarantined month is sweet. Not cruellest, for that would be February. What is the human capacity for crying exactly? I had cried all 28 days to water the snowdrops, saved the 29th for one great, acidic cry of my life.
April, I dreamt you had leapt from the hole in my head / and the hole in my head from the length of your light.
April, we name our sadnesses arbitrarily. The sadness is a euphemism for what we are tired of saying, and even saying ‘these times’, and even saying the strangeness. To live in the sadness or strangeness, say
April, a shattering epiphany that I still
April, my kindest regards.
April, the dying narcissi.
April, I never signed on to be locked indoors, never signed on for these losses or debts. Never signed on for these sadnesses and yet they are happening, belonging to someone in pain upstairs, lending a movie, tending a wage.
April, the sadness of paragraphs.
April, I watch you teach at a distance, blue-dimming with cans of juice.
April, The Baudelaire Fractal.
April, the pedagogy of longing. I lose dull words. I teach myself not to need you. I learn to need the living itself. Lil Peep screams in my ear, ISN’T LIFE BEAUTIFUL / I THINK THAT LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL. This is a kind of instruction.
April, the sarcasm of flowers.
April, I walk in the underpass reading the red paint, Make the rich pay. The president is everywhere and nowhere, confected aleatory; a bad rhizome, the president has bleached his words. Tap root political, it can’t get out. The water doesn’t flow here. There’s lead, but no leader.
April, I found a Jason Molina lyric buried in a poem by Peter Gizzi. I had been writing about the undersong but this was ‘Oversong’, the verb ‘to be’ eclipsing ‘me’.
April, I wander the lonely rhubarb clouds, an hour or so. The world on edge.
April, there’s lead in the water.
April, I would polish your cutlery.
April, someone on the radio is defending his advice on a bleachy digest.
April, say hi to Angela for me.
April, where are your showers?
April, what would I ask of your showers?
April, the poems. Mary Ruefle filling the 22nd with sunflower hearts, or was it her friend, ‘Please Read’. How I misread wilted for waited, waited for wilted. Seeds of words. How I knew nothing about the orange blossom excepting its smell, which I drunk so hard, not knowing the name but only how passing a top-note I wanted it all perfumed within me. This form of quietness akin to heat or light. Who would design this, and all that beauty.
April, the air is cherried with synonyms. You spit out the coolest noun for this.
April, I eat breakfast at six in the evening.
April, you are teasing me with readings and the old response; I have no ability. My year folds back into last, remembering the burn in my stomach, wanting to get there fast and slow, the scenery seen from a train. Manchester blossoms before Glasgow and the song about the orange room, the pinks in the street, the wondering. I did not know then that I would take you, carry a little seed in me.
April, I have so little to say.
April, sprained ankles.
April, the canal is glistening at dusk.
April, the supercut / us.
April, in these uncertain times, you are the discount. Please let me out for a walk, on all things said, the passing around of a line.
April, James Schuyler remembered you to a French pear and the sulphur-yellow bees. I was nostalgic also, pollinating the document with all my normals. What difference it made. They said a world.
April, the pollen set free.
April, the edge of the world is grey.
April, the sunlight’s adultery.
April, what sex?
April, fuck you, that was yesterday.
April, I’m reading Lee Harwood again for the sea that I miss. Infinite sea that I miss.
April, I want to run down the slope of the universe and think a single intelligent thought.
April, they are absolute units.
April, the rivers are so low I’m starting to think ‘they’ need sertraline. Sweet relief of the rain.
April, fuck it I love you.
April, it’s always somebody’s birthday and now they’re blowing out candles on Zoom.
April, you buy me groceries.
April, I’m starting to think I once met a girl called April. She wore her hair in elaborate braids, and the kirby grips shone in the sun the one day in July when I ate ice lollies by the fountain at the end of all I remember. The roses were over-watered, all colours of the sun. Generous, redundant, you tossed in bank notes to wish this was over.
April, Lee says ‘her beauty undresses the sea’. You picture that, the flicker where the dress is the same as the blue as she is the sea.
April, I wear blue and roll myself out where the sun would set.
April, I can’t stop quoting Clarice.
April, I want somebody else’s salt.
April, the pink moon, the Lyrid meteors.
April, there’s something I want to delete.
April, I was crying for the violinist on the radio, crying for those in her apartment, dying. Two of them, she said, barely in their forties, choking up.
April, I felt like a meme. A bad guy.
April, make the rich pay.
April, it was so on the nose the writing was giving me zits and I’m sorry. Keep thinking this is it this is it this is it and I’m sorry.
April, this stamina of maintaining the romance of living.
April, naming us yellowest flowers.
April, a lunar-resistant photography sings.
April, give me the negatives.
April, it all started on the eleventh. I went a ritualised cycle in the sweet warm rain, with flies stuck jewel-like to the sweat of my chest. I kept going and going until my heart gave out a charitable breathlessness.
April, you have a shark smile and I wonder what it is you might do to me.
April, I really miss Nice ‘n’ Sleazys, pints of Guinness, gigs & readings.
April, the air is a silver curve.
April, you are thousands of results.
April, the change I can’t have.
April, the little black cat tried to get in the door and for a while we sat there and then scooping her up I held her awhile, her wee beating heart next to mine. The warmest thing in weeks. Her glass eyes looked to the curve-glass moon and we both were momentary slivers. I went inside and washed my hands and the soap bubbles… and I hope she got home eventually.
April, oracular.
April, it felt stupid as a miracle.
April, consider the orchid.
April, it made of us talking heads. I dreamt I went through the screen and it was all a quiet darkness of matter, having read Karen Barad, having watched Twin Peaks. Is it that you go through your own eyes, zooming, watching to see what they’d do in the afterglow, repeating yourself. Here is the other Maria, etc. I watched you on someone else’s story, like a bad cartoon, the bad rehearsal of all of our laughter, a bad white powder.
April, I hate this.
April, my pins and needles.
April, Marianne Morris says ‘Never lay in the dirt elated’.
April, my dad sends me pictures of lambs.
April, it gets so I don’t want to call anymore because it hurts more not being with you in the summer, the summer, the amiable feeling.
April, the president says to try light and heat.
April, you are rice cakes, sadness and crushed velour.
April, the world is not primed or administered.
April, ‘they’ failed ‘us’, etc.
April, blue masks lay on the pavement like plasters afloat in the pools of my youth and I wonder whose wounding was minor, to take that off.
April, I swim in it.
April, a lesson.
April, I felt in the fortress of dreams the falling into after-this. On a spinning top at the park by the beach and we held on forever / and all my old friends were shining.
‘Hear me, hear my silence. What I say is never what I say but instead something else. When I say “abundant waters” I’m speaking of the force of body in the waters of the world. It captures that other thing that I’m really saying because I myself cannot.’
— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin
— Adrienne Rich, ‘Diving into the Wreck’
On becoming a body,
the little abundant shines and its pores are clotted with dust.
I saw what sound it was a wave makes
when startled by gestures towards this torsion
a long beach, the false irrigation of beautiful islands.
The melody was a long intimation of losing faith
in what is meant by a certain colour, not
this blue which runs in the prussian rain.
I want to run up the spine of your back
and settle the amygdala city, tie
my lyrical wrists in mobius fibres
and return the rights to speech.
Do you want to continue?
He was born and beautiful,
he might have seizures. We interfere in definition.
The depression of time is a beautiful curve
in the small of morning, named
after the call you wanted.
Blue dust of feeling.
Blue dust of biblical name.
I worry for his tiny heart.
Glycolic, afloat
in the radical millions
when I say this bird
is a nameless bird, plotting
and pecking the wreck
I go down
in such hunger
I go down
without formula.
Not this.
The world is stuck.
I sing to you
in the echo, in the rich
and greatest loss.
Who hurt us?
I had a dream we were swimming
in the San Pedro Bay, just like the video
it was almost sunny. There will come a time
when my car won’t start
if I ever have a car
in a lightless world
the structure of passion is a ritzy hotel.
Your hour is a fucking astronaut.
Imagine Disney injected
arterial dreams
this crudely.
Imagine a fire in the minibar
at the back of your mind.
As the relation to your wreck
I call it ship, I still want
the elsewhere conduit of thoughts
to sign my brain as treeware
in the black black gold
my oleochemical, fear of soap
and gaussian world is a kitten.
She burns it all up.
On becoming this back-lit
history of pixels, we pour into jars
the last of sea-glass, liquid shingles, I cut the bird
into salad I cut this sort of pristine hope
to feed the kitten.
I thought the picket
was shining in rain, a sound.
Something is drawing us out.
I make a romance from your shoes
and the kissable way of these days
is a no-show, mewing, the marketing
of genital shame, the apocalypse breakfast
tastes of salt. Come back into my life,
I always found you
with a breath laced in pesticide,
a currency of morphine
dreaming me
back like a thrush, I want to wreck
the multitude of this song
with its hyperthermia, its oil-made
hide of feathers.
You want me to be less literal,
littoral I like your wildlife.
Lighter, somewhere
what we see
without reason.
What can soak
up the dark this good.
I like your messages.
I like to react with my abstract halo.
The rediagnosis read depression, to kill
not clean the long and beautiful rain.
Prising the daylight from its packet
I want April, a lot
of lilac song.
I go down to the nervous water,
deep in mammalian blood
I am, I am
not breath, not bird
west coast
my body is a poke of air
in the book. And it lets in
the crudest wind, reminder of gold
in the room where we woke up last October
in my father’s house
in the valley
where frost never leaves the cornicing forests
or sets its voice to speak
for the sodas and junipers.
If we could just avalanche into orange
like the song, Mount Eerie would be a genuine place
to kill or not kill the birds we oiled
in the prussian rain, they gleam
like unemployment
doesn’t in the colourless streets.
We share a little nest
of noctilucent materials.
I was jobless
as the natural light, listening
to your comedown opening chord
which is to say, I think we should stop
seeing, I think we should stop
seeing at all. I roll around
in the oil of this
happiest adderall
to sob uncontrollable
to stop trying to see you
as snow,
if a former love should fall
very cool, like a two-minute Uber
costs less than lunch.
Ducter, he
could break me
the ultimate mosh is us.
I have said that he could and he could
I have said that too much.
To float like capital
back to your panic
I smooth my sleepless residuals.
Ducked it, ducked it
you come back, holding a blink
to know
that time is a gleam, we had a guest speaker
passing out in notional
structures of passion.
I wrote everything down.
It is a wreck to think in the beautiful rain.
It is all that dissolves
to remember
I hope to meet in code someday
again, to set this
in parenthesis, very lightly
choosing to run
the artificial palms
horizontal across your eventide.
This was all ours in the poem.
Prospering, we’d know
each other
so much more than mineral
in the flotsam
way, a lot of coffee
fills our faultlines
and the tar sands sing, and the quicksands
go astray, what of the waters
don’t touch what we were
to sing something
hurting, to rainbow
the quoted weight of your heart
is only debris
I go so long in the rain
to break her
I go so long in the run
as to make a beach
in loops of oil
to empty my purse
of mermaids, to feel like
the only decorated islands
in the United States of America.
*
This poem was written following a talk I gave on Energy (W)rites: Telling the Embodied Stories of Energy, as part of The Curatorial Fellowship: With the North Sea series at Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen. It responds specifically to Lana Del Rey’s ‘The Greatest’, where the mournful twangs of a classic rock ballad play out over sunset scenes of Long Beach in the San Pedro Bay, whose four decorative ‘Astronaut Islands’ were built in the sixties to camouflage offshore oil derricks and muffle their sound pollution. Classic rock is a genre and industry founded on oil: vinyl is a type of plastic made from ethylene (found in crude oil) combined with chlorine (found in salt). PVC, the resultant material, is a highly toxic form of plastic, for both our health and the environment. Perhaps it’s only ‘natural’ that Lana would style a kind of vinyl-nostalgia to sing of various kinds of tainted existence. If her earlier work was dubbed ‘Hollywood sadcore’, we might note this recent aesthetic shift as something more like ‘anthropocene sadcore’: where the cinematic eulogising of wasted youth, ‘the greatest’ American Dream, is played out against the false beauty of late twentieth-century petroscapes. But alongside oil there is also water, and the brilliance of light, tone and pigment. There is haze and trace and repeat. Lush tints within variant opacity. A khoratic space where the colours soften or harshen into each other and something of form is held between, with varying paleness or intensity. It could be Billie Eilish singing of ‘burning cities / And napalm skies’ in the apocalypse unconscious of her song ‘Ocean Eyes’; it could be a flare of orange burning into Grimes’ ‘permanent blue’, its elegia for opioid bliss and extinction. The weird pleasure vistas of a scene we can’t quite name. An improvised blur or break. What the water speaks as a force of shimmer. The accompanying visual works are by multimedia artist and sculptor Jack O’Flynn.
Pleased to announce this sky-blue baby, a collaboration with the wonderful Katy Lewis Hood, has been in the world a week now, and you can order from Broken Sleep Books, for a cool £6.50.
From the publishers:
infra·structure is a collaborative work shaped over a year of correspondence between Katy Lewis Hood and Maria Sledmere. The pamphlet was written following an Association of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference on the Orkney islands, a wind battered archipelago north of the Scottish mainland. The poems respond to this distinct setting and share a dichotomous relationship where each ‘complete’ poem is mirrored by an ‘incomplete’ sister poem. Katy Lewis Hood and Maria Sledmere’s innovative dismantling of language echoes the destructive energy of the natural world. infra·structure is a highly original, must read pamphlet.
