Rereading Kathleen Fraser’s Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (2000) in preparation for some teaching this year. Stumbled into Barbara Guest’s dreamscapes. How much does emotion colour your dreams? Sometimes such residue feels the longest hours beyond. How often a day’s blue tint, whose dream was responsible? I live in Sunday celadon. I love you. Ardent light.
Featuring nearly thirty authors, our next issue takes a slomo plunge into the ocean in search of lost cities, cephalopods and that selkie we made friends with in ’93. The issue features poetry, fiction and essaying around themes of alien drift, andromeda, billionaire hubris, despairing jacuzzis and more.
From my editor’s introduction:
Our title, BERMUDA ▲ SADCORE, embodies the vibe theory of oceanic feeling. The word sad, in its Germanic origin, connotes ‘weighty, dense’, eventually replaced in Middle English with the sense of ‘steadfast, firm’ — later ‘sorrowful’. The ocean is at once weighty, dense and everchanging, temperamental. We love the doleful, consonant insistence of the ‘d’ in ‘sad’ and ‘bermuda’. In recent years, the ocean has been toxified by microplastics, literally set on fire, forced to house massive, heat-generating data centres and scraped for rare earth minerals. If anyone has the right to be sad, it’s the ocean. And the ocean, historically feminised as sailors did with their boats, might herself be the Anthropocenic siren in the night everafter. Our original home and eventual disaster. Stop me if this sounds like an emo lyric.
What would it mean to be sad forever? Or to be steadfast in sadness, like the great eighteenth-century poet Charlotte Smith: who would wander the cliffs of Beachy Head and later write her Elegiac Sonnets from a debtor’s prison. To be sad forever is to forever be facing the sea. The vibrant imaginaries of the poems, essays and fiction contained herein will transport you to bodies of water whose sumptuous power to surprise, query and upend our bodies of knowledge is remarkable. The only way in is through surrender. In the movie Triangle of Sadness (2022), the rich are punished for their attempts to control, own and influence everything. With virtuosic abjection, we are witness to them literally vomiting the poisoned fruit of the ocean.
The issue features the following contributors:
Adam Fraser
Al Anderson
Al Crow
Alex Grafen
Ali Graham
Amy Grandvoinet
Andrew Hykel Mears
Carolyn Hashimoto
Dan Power
Daniel Ridley
Fynn Kǒster
Grace Marshall
Iain Morrison
India Bucknall
James Andrews
J.R. Carpenter
John McCutcheon
Kim Crowder
Lauren Kalita
Lizzy Yarwood
Matt Pollock
Mattea Gernentz
Matthew Kinlin
Rahul Santhanam
Rose du Charme
Ruby Eleftheriotis
Sam Francis
Victoria Brooks
1846975493
You can read the whole thing for free here or download a pdf here.
Thanks as ever to Douglas Pattison for co-editing, curating and designing the cover art.
Earlier this year I published some poems in the anthology Pink Witch. Some of the other anthologised poets will be reading and in conversation with Zoe Venditozzi, co-founder of the Witches of Scotland campaign on 26th September. Event starts at 7:30pm and is at the Sauchiehall Waterstones in Glasgow.
Get your tickets here.
More info:
‘An evening of poetry, feminism and witchcraft with the poets of Pink Witch chat with Zoe Venditozzi, co-founder of the Witches of Scotland.
A chance aside by Zoe Venditozzi of the Witches of Scotland campaign inspired the poems of Pink Witch, which question identity, vilification and the names historically used to constrain women. Now for the first time, the poets chat with Zoe and discuss the inspiration behind these dark, insightful and frequently humorous pieces. Witches of Scotland is a campaign for a legal pardon, an apology and a national monument for the thousands of people executed for witchcraft in Scotland. The campaign was set up by Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell KC. Their podcast has over 70 episodes. Pink Witch is topical, intimate and eclectic, in turns sombre and funny, lighthearted and reflective, by some of Scotland’s best women poets.’
Cool news. Will be in Berlin weekend of 12-15th September doing two readings. It would be lovely to see some of you there!
Friday 13th September, 7pm
POETRY: Reading & Discussion with Maria Sledmere & Ian Macartney
7pm, FIXOTEK, Lohmühlenstraße 65, Berlin, Germany 12435
Thanks to Hopscotch for hosting!
No tickets just show up.
&
Sunday 15th September 2024
1-3pm, ChertLüdde Potsdamer Straße, Berlin
Reading with Ian Macartney, Max Parnell and Ari Níelsson from 1-3 PM, followed by an open mic at 4pm. This performance event is part of Ali Eyal & David Horvitz’s exhibition, A new garden from old wounds, whose title is taken from a poem of mine, ‘Deciduous‘ which was recently published by berlin lit.
No tickets just show up.
More about the exhibition:
In their duo exhibition, A new garden from old wounds, artists Ali Eyal and David Horvitz explore geographical and conceptual distances, delve into the intricate boundaries of memories and emotions, and investigate how fragmentary elements can come together to form a new enduring presence. The exhibition brings together new and existing works that interconnect with each other as separate fragments of a single unit.
Opening Reception: 12 September 2024, 6 – 9 pm
11 September – 12 October 2024
ChertLüdde Potsdamer
this is the year I also dreamed: ‘Jack Russell dogs joined together like a big long links sausage’ (26/6/16)
Hello everyone!
I’m thrilled to be reading at the launch of Stacy Skolnik’s The Ginny Suite this Saturday at Burning House Books. The novel is one of my favourites in a long time — a pearlescent, speculative many splintered tale of mystery, hysteria and the world fuckery of technology evermore. I savoured it and reread certain pages with a dreamy clarity because deja vu was the narrative logic that I could most accurately access. When I finished it, nestled at the airport waiting lounge, I immediately wanted to read it again but I’m almost afraid to. I talked with Courtney over email and we agreed that the book lodged in our brains. That might be the most proper description. It crystallised the eerie fourth space feeling of proximate and synthesised intelligence. It was strange and razor-edged and a glut of forms and genres stitched up in this thing called the novel. My favourite thing about the novel is when it can serve as a kind of nervous container of multiple ideas and concepts playing out in time. The book itself is experiential prosthesis.
More info:
‘Information didn’t need to be remembered; it remembered her…’
A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.
Born in Belfast on Valentine’s Day, Suki Hollywood is a writer and poet. Her work has been featured in Gutter, Deleuzine, SPAM, Water Wings and more. Her debut novel ‘Jesus Freaks – a queer thriller – is available now via wwww.sukihollywood.com.
Maria Sledmere’s latest collection is ‘Cinders’ with Krupskaya Books, 2024. She is managing editor of SPAM Press and a Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. With Kevin Leomo, she is one half of Project Somnolence: a portable lab for exploring speculative approaches to sleep across art, literature and daily life. Her next book, ‘Midsummer Song (Hypercritique)’ is forthcoming with NoUP Press in 2024.
Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chapbook Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade for Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). She is a co-founder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform. The Ginny Suite is her debut novel.
Book free tickets here ✨
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