mariaology

lego roses

An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun

£12.00

RELEASED 19TH JUNE 2023

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

Blending oneiric memoir, experimental fiction and glitched verse, An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun swirls narratives of adolescence, occulted textual topographies and Scotland’s pandemic lockdown. Sweet, funny, heartbreaking, clever and ridiculous, often sentence-by-sentence, Maria Sledmere doesn’t guide readers through these whirlwinds so much as throw them in. Yet her spliced reveries and decadent languages are always underpinned by a celebration of community, as radiant and permeating as the sun.

198 x 129 mm / 254 pages with illustrations and photographs

Preorder from Hem Press

Thirty Love

I’m not turning thirty
I’m just two fifteen-year-olds living inside each other
trying to get high
in the foetal position, being
summer denim of wanting to crash a pink car and
be done again

slightly out of sync
blossomability

many circus strays
coming apart at the seams
feeling gloam and yogic
the dog licking peanut butter from deep in the jar
of common nutrient
lightning burst out my early life
gone clown anon
bright and soundproof
strawberry motorway moon
more on earth than ever

Covet the pearl zone
for perfect touch, the greatest football hits of oblivion
screaming at each other why not
call out the willowy you
being louche as hell
shedding the
water weight

wearing grave emoji
things I can’t say
discard complete water works
total my carless mind
in prairie physiology
crying wild lupine
lucky girl

Roleplaying cuddlecore
applying emotional topcoat
I want to sabotage language at source
invincible in supercrush
scoring a hat-trick
forget chapped lips
stop being the autodidact
shoving vending machines into communism

“Yes,” said everything, “wait and see.”
Hope unlocked streets of it
seeing myself grown backwards
spiral of childhood computer realism
beautifully archived cloud formation
having lemonade with them

I want to learn natural breath talent like
effortless summer quantum
angel chancellery of Harriet Wheeler
the fractal age of being remembered
love thirty
simulates
living in time-
sensitive seedballs
winning the main affection
your aura an orange-tipped butterfly
knows me imago-
formed at the middle
hot pyramidal orchid
nutrient poor
never leaving your chrysalis

I would give a whole voice, gold shining sounds
in the gorse mandy
glow up
for gemini life cycle
link in biome
all nerve
heavenly
electropolis
in bath spider soliloquy
how do I eat

Turning thirty
in permanent acoustic mutability
pushing my name down the stairs

it’s funny and sad
like television lacunae
or oestradiol credit score

a feel good
pulse ballet of love inclination

Being mortal goldilocks
awake forever warm and moreish
sometimes I forget
we held each other
meadow-wise
blemished white lies and cowslip
nights of insane fertility

gentler than a blood result mood boost
born in the year of In Utero

Saturn returns
sirens
at the back of cinema

When I can’t replicate
being the same two ages
everything will be
okay

and windswept so
totally interesting
pretty void bluet

drinking a case of Sundays

prom waltzing myself
back to bed in each stanza

one of us says to the other
about that pain in our side
“who bruised you?”

Dream chocolate bar

Daily writing prompt

Describe your dream chocolate bar.

View all responses

Dreams are blood gossamer of the quantum, obviously. Trapping them for product didn’t prove easy to history but those motherfuckers always gonna try. We loved the sound of wrapping and unwrapping our dreams each night because we’d slept through the day of the day’s burnish, polishing I mean ourselves with sounds: popular and like rock or love electronique real easy. I caught almond-headed angel blessing in desiccated ouch. Glass ersatz of the coruscating plastic. My dream chocolate is 53% cocoa solid milk uptake, hot oat, sumptuous rolling out of time — plainsong of longer energy. A porridge bar coated in chocolate and studded with rat dropping hours and real man. Louche caramel alimony coming cloud sugar rupture. Heist of splendour. Marshmallow contemplators are god. Dream chocolate nurture my easy sleep knowing everything to look at it taking bites.

Away From You Becoming Me

Alice Notley, *Early Works* (Fonograf Editions, 2023)

High Fructose Corn Oath

High Fructose Corn Oath

I swear that I
will play true ally
to your malady
so help me pepsi

New summer school workshop series: Experimental Ecopoetics

Excited to deliver this four-part workshop series in August for the87press, alongside two other courses by the brilliant Verity Spott and Jessica Widner. These will be cosy sessions on Zoom and feature a range of small press poetries, which we will read, write from and discuss in two hour workshops.

About the Course

Ecopoetics is a capacious term, meaning something like ‘the incorporation of an ecological or environmental perspective into the study of poetics’ (Kate Rigby). As both a creative and critical practice, ecopoetics explores the relationship between literature and the more-than-human world, often in curious, radical and transformative ways. Ecopoetics offers a fieldwork, site of experiment and a tool for (un)dwelling: tuning into ideas of environmentalism, activism, climate crisis, landscape, documentation, dreamwork and lyric. Ecopoetics is not just witnessing; it is an active engagement with habitats, affects, sensing, solidarity and politics — including questions of gender, race, sexuality, land rights and embodiment. On this course, we’ll stray from dominant canons of ‘green’ literature and onto alternative pastures: offering a broad introduction to ecopoetics through particular focus on Anglo-American small press poetries. Each session, structured as a combination of seminar and workshop, will involve reading, discussion and writing activity around themes such as everyday life, elemental thinking, dream and radical ecologies. We’ll investigate key terms such as animality, weather, nature, landscape, energy, the body, time and coexistence through works that expand our notion of who or what speaks in a poem, and where or what is ‘Nature’. Open to anyone with an interest in poetry and ecology, the sessions presume no prior experience with writing workshops, and sharing work in class is not required. A core reading list will be provided freely in the form of electronic extracts, with further suggested reading also listed.

Marble Zone

My whole blood is this lava. I’ve been playing an iPhone emulator of the original Sonic the Hedgehog, a game we used to rinse for hours on the Megadrive at my cousin’s house as kids. Playing it now, I find passing through the levels extremely, maddeningly difficult. It might be the iPhone controls (I’ve been mourning the loss of BUTTONS ever since my last Blackberry in 2013) or it might be a general disintegration of spatial awareness and emotional regulation. Pushing boulders around, dodging spike-tipped chandeliers and rolling gushes of lava really sets my blood boiling. The land behind me is on fire and there’s not much time to hang around. But one thing I notice, as my lil Sonic sprite navigates the game, is that I can hear my cousin’s tween voice in my ear and my own silent childhood learning and listening. This is really comforting. Sweet tips she had about ring sites, springs on high, a hidden extra life. I keep dying in the game but I remember something of childhood. I don’t really have landscapes to easily go back to. The years behind me are on fire, but Marble Zone remains.

April Reading Groups

Pleased to be running two reading groups as part of the #ARCSpringFling 2023 at University of Glasgow. Open to anyone with an interest with plant ecologies, mushrooms and creative-critical approaches to environmental thinking, please sign up and come along with your questions, threads of thought and other entanglements!

We will be looking at