In 2018, I started a Doctorate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. I also started a new diary. In October, the month it all started, I wrote about duplicate footsteps and permanent landfills. I wrote of lacking the energy to dance, being lost in the forest, looking for safety among swirling leaves. Can’t remember if the forest was real or metaphorical. I wrote seemingly in lieu of being able to actually venture beyond the confines of my working life. Over three years and three months, I went through multiple iterations of research focus. I looked at foam, clouds, technicity, glitter, quotidian measures, fire and cinders. I fell asleep on coaches circling lochan sunsets. I produced a list of figures for how we might conceptualise this project. It was a sort of Escherian dollshouse, a self-deconstruction of building this place to think. I thought about Bhanu Kapil dropping her book in the river. I thought about doing a writer’s residency within the confines of a square-shaped digital platform. I wrote of ‘An angel tossing her gunpowder sequins’ and ethical eating, ‘how so often you are so paralysed between two choices that you just don’t eat at all’. I wondered what kind of home this work would make for me. This was a material question: thanks to the Scottish Graduate School of Arts & Humanities, it was a funded period. It paid me through Covid-19.
These were my original research questions:
How can creative and critical writing interrogate and depict the apparent tensions between the Anthropocene’s deep-time and the quotidian context of our ecological orientations?
What hybrid critical-creative forms might open up possibilities for a future ecological art, one which builds productive ways of ‘tuning in’ to a non-anthropocentric experience, with reflexive attention to the artistic and technological media involved in this process?
How might ‘the everyday’ provide a temporal and formal mode through which to develop a critical, interdisciplinary Anthropocene aesthetics, negotiating ecological questions of affect, sensory relations, ethics and responsibility at scales both macro and micro, human and nonhuman?
It is up to the reader to decide how far the end result fulfilled or strayed from these lines of enquiry.
Six years on, having graduated from being a baby scholar-poet, I am really thrilled this project has found a dream home with No University Press, a new imprint from Tenement Press. The ‘no’ of refusal feels appropriate to this project, which very much concerns the affordances and limits of an academic and institutional mode when thinking through (im)possible questions of ecological thought and living on. Working with Benjamin Pickford and Dominic Jaeckle, editors at Tenement, I was able to bring the project’s creative detours and modalities to life in its final book form: Midsummer Song (Hypercritique). This is definitely the most ambitious work of my life. It’s 469 pages of critique, poetics, meadow work, illustration and elegy. I see the whole book as a big song, a study, an architectural attempt at making an ecological home in lyric.
Somewhere between an academic monograph and performative dreamwork, poetry and poetics, conceptualism and the commonplace.
You can order the book direct from Tenement here or from Asterism here.
You can read a full description of the book and access endorsements, sample poems and other materials here.
I will be touring the book at some upcoming dates in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and London:
09.11.24 Peter Barlow’s Cigarette / with Maria Sledmere, Harriet Tarlo & Lucy Wilkinson The Carlton Club, Whalley Range Manchester See here.
05.11.24 Midsummer Song / Readings & Discussion Maria Sledmere, David Farrier & Colin Herd Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh See here.
26.10.24 Midsummer Song / Readings & Discussion Maria Sledmere, Chris McCabe Small Publishers Fair Conway Hall, London See here.
22.10.24 Midsummer Song / Readings & Discussion Maria Sledmere, Carl Lavery & Colin Herd Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow / (Online via Zoom) See here.
Just found a sequin in my cup of tea now stuck to the organ grinding medicine of the morning after Claire de Luna declares it licking the inside shot of tequila like antediluvians lining the seabed with SSRIs did somebody say “free margaritas” I want to love the salt-rimming margins of reading the poem liquefied drunk lilac of loving
Smashed the disco piñata of my brain just to feel something logistical about happiness Blake says “eternity is in love with the productions of time” which is why we celebrate birthdays for age verification under the name of human nature like nobody puts baby on the carousel ouch, taking half of the pill you are horse girl summer.
*
Nobody at the wedding was on their phone. I think we should get married more often, why not do it over and over licensed a la carte of loving lightning bolts drawn on James that’s how it starts surrendering mood to the iPod shuffle of the noughties what monoculture still plays in thine ears is radio weight like watching your life salve lip-syncing grace of plenitude tattooed on our ankles tomorrow I travel 499 miles to witness meltwater come into song.
Julia Cameron says god has a lot of money. Did Kanye read The Artist’s Way? Junk bond celestine of autumn goldenness doesn’t glow like it used to, cash in my pocket starts to burn ecological moonlighting ruins on the basis of cigarettes in process light nutrient water recycling boosts the release of serotonin from the pre- synaptic cell party hiya stuffed pistachio cookie ether, either way. Drink up baby.
I’m so in love with my friends it might become a problem doing star jumps to ‘Sugar We’re Going Down’ like holding sparklers too close to the sky, they start to think they’re shooting stars.
*
Alex is a gender-neutral name of Greek origin meaning “defender of humankind” which is why they sent you to fuck the anthropocene so hard it turns to seafoam.
O God of Wine lush chromosomes of sleep adequacy fill my eyelids with orange dreamt sexuality of star speak Yasi is reading Kierkegaard and I’m crying finally alien pixels of being dumb emotional girl clutter surfing the internet permafrost people called me a living sim supervised by Anna Tsing I was salon assistant to the sadness device of forest massage.
It cost so much to let go of her leaving.
*
The apocalypse is stylised polyester. You are wearing a dress of flame and burning up that slay would leave no fire behind you, white hot praxis rats with necklaces of satellite dishes beam me up softly to want Carhartt durable rent stabilised limbo of being a work in progress touched luminous thot climbing the ladder charisma
I was told a wild case of golden goose bumps a literal golden goose prone to memorising pop songs buying shares in Ethereum stomach pain from the ice crush of so many bruises.
*
Still going strong in the life morning beautiful four-leaf lovers queen of the lit department trying to learn Luna checking the pee mail of the neighbourhood canines: Bruce woz ere, Peanut sayz hi I ❤ Keats etc.
*
I mean the kind of snack that happens upon you, loves you back happy birthday foreverie golden surrounds finish the cookie to keep the peace trebuchet of personality the shape of how I love them is inexplicable like math fruit of loving itself Cinderace soccer ball of kicking fire up in car headlights just to write this adrenaline voice note of Caroline’s hopedrunk everlasting encore volcano of yasssified gender
our bar in Berlin translates as COMRADE NEST 3000 playing disco vintage of parataxis like putting the word ‘no’ in a poem as if to image the jagged edge of snowflakes snagged in my curriculum vitae of oesophageal rupture like hi, a career.
I’ll add that to the ADHD craft graveyard of my personal sabotage email embroidery flavour of the meadow we’re in for a bit. I like having a reason to be a little invisible dabbing the blue idea of what you said people should scunnersome boycott the grade device until they realise intelligence is weather dependent.
*
I was my own sister kissed forehead a server farm of purloined bog myrtle from which distress is the same gaping brilliantly not like a wound just a knot in a tree made of cloud as you said of ceremony’s gigabyte largesse gone into orb tomorrow wear something comfortable and look HOT out in the plasmatron reality holism.
*
Happy birthday, but like in four-dimensional waltz time trying my altitude regret I stay really high in the hero stage doing Barbie parkour while someone smokes blunts out the infra- twilight of being alive with y’all so much spinning around flowers in the pouring rain getting lit lit, lit, lit: let them eat chips.
It’s been a while since we recorded an episode of Lunch Club over at SPAM HQ, but I was really excited to join Jac Common and Ian Macartney in the studio to discuss the 2020 spamphlet Bad Moon by Samantha Walton.
Galina Rymbu, Life in Space (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020, trans. Joan Brooks).
William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) public domain.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ii.I
Aiskhylos, Agamemnon in An Oresteia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, trans. Anne Carson)
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (London: Vintage, 1992).
Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).
Fred Carter (2022) ‘`Crude Oil Shaping Forms of Writing`: Galina Rymbu’s Life in Space, Ecoes, 4, 56-65.
Esther Leslie, Fog, Froth and Foam: Insubstantial Matters in Substantive Atmospheres in Electric Brine (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021, ed. Jennifer Teets).
Sophie Lewis (2017) ‘Amniotechnics’, The New Enquiry, link
Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (New York, London: Duke University Press, 2021).
Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other. We all have a “Grapevine” entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain.
— Natalie Mering
Of course, the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world are one.
— Catherine Malabou
Morning brings indigo gluttony of the night’s dim prizes. I remember a night in February of 2019, the brightest stars in my life we saw above a kirkyard eating chocolate for all the stars. Looking for tickets to see you again, star stuff for popcorn synecdoche of eating the bones of what you believe at the movies, infinity pool, the liminal alimony of the heart you have. I pay it all back which is why skylines exist. At this time of year, we make our own light. I text you all day and all night the text pings resonate without me, though I’m still conscious. This is how I listen to music. Harvest the ricochets until my synapse nozzles are ripe and sweet.
“It’s too difficult”
the beautiful song in my ear The Butterfly splitfin will go extinct this year
“My plastic girlhood obligatory wrote a novel you’d never know elemental love for the noise of horses”
Electra pastel of giving the lecture
Its voice never falters
Spotify should hire poets to replace the algorithm with iambs
A perfect way to respond?
The album cover of Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow features a glowing heart which is the idiosyncrasy of love song, gentle and melodic and good and wrong. There is something we say at breakfast about the inexplicable intimacy of an interval, this bit in the song where the chords do this or that and suddenly your heart’s aflutter. Why is that? I feel vulnerable and unclasped by music like the locket of a promise necklace snapped open, opulent. When are you gonna feel okay?
I like it best when I don’t expect it.
/
Designing the conditions for crying is easy these days. A tiny fly lands on my wet nail polish and departs as lavender.
I used to wander the abandoned golf course and around the monument to see the snowcapped hills and feel it.
Perished by screaming clouds in my brain.
I am in love with the music of Weyes Blood, we share the same birthday.
At a recent gig the singer said “thank you all for being alive”. Some people describe these songs as hymns. Last year in the climate rush of COP26 I was cycling around with my bones on fire and freezing. I would show up to the job being stared at, horrible mess of myself couldn’t hide, what do you think of this poem I said it’s a lot to unpack. Why don’t we leave those tools in the box? He says toolbox isn’t so bad. You could just improvise. I don’t look to these men to be mentors but menthols were my first cigarettes, a clothing brand called MEN is like SHEIN you could have MENOUT or menagerie, mispronounced as shine, a giraffe made of glass or a tiny glass seal with whiskers of onyx, weeping. MELATONIN or MENACING, MENDACITY / my avuncular muses of more money have outraged, they will never understand candida. A spanner in the works. No more lies. I’m most men when in lingerie maybe or styling my old surprise, the giant window in a dream wouldn’t close after I’d opened it so I had to go looking for a man to help me, high-vis or high waters our time would come to close it, not until I had escaped. Fled is that happiness. Look at it hardcore. No more lies, no more dying. Your arms in the air.
I heard catastrophe on the grapevine which was snipping guitar strings all the better to hear the lyre underneath, the union makes us strong, picket-cold and trellises our kitten hearts are growing, Natalie as in a new flower or the Minecraft roses coming up fast this year to be eaten by the dreams of spiders. Nicky Melville poem says if you’re a soft person you just get squashed, Sarah once read it aloud at the picket. I pictured a soft orange in the principal’s pocket. Roses last forever even when past their superlative. Shedding their petals to cover our eyes. Bunny put them in cubes to exhibit. Smooth wax skin.
Violet roses.
Ever since my friend with the purple aura died I’ve worn so much purple to find a flame of them, purple flame of my Raynaud’s and holy flux of traumas. What’s the point of poetry, it’s purple. I lilac therefore I lamb. I am on the lamb, I am lambing seasons, turn me into a leaf on the riptide, for I am lost. The clouds are glamorous, in pursuit of beauty’s excreta, a bad era, the best
negentropy saves us from losing everything
Secret blue note.
Wine-dark reverie of the quiet escapade, my late heart blooms for the red, the read receipt staining your tongue.
Catherine Malabou says ‘The body becomes worthy of philosophical examination when it is no longer a question of the body but of my body’. Descartes dripping wax on his robes, a lecturer pouring a pan of boiling pasta over his hand in rehearsal; the red welts between two moments, my horrible bleeding thumb. Scarlet clustering of old blood. Say it feels personal, say it is orange or purple. When it started inside me I felt the glow in my chest handed down by hyleticism of data from song: the body electric or incarnate. Menstrual tripping, I saw Kate Winslet literally on fire in fantasy after watching Romance & Cigarettes but she was invincible, what’s this script, literally the fire coming out of her in waves was my love of music. I harboured desires to stub cigarettes out on the wrists of saplings, light them and throw them barely smoked on the street; imagine my child self, scurrying around to collect them, smoking wholeheartedly the barely unsmouldered, especially rose ones. Lemonade’s infinity sunflower. I was so guilty in my treehouse for getting high, higher, highest of them all to bioluminesce in lieu of sunsets, fuck it. The cruelty displayed to our cousins was a lonesome one. What’s that word for when a word is hinged between two things, like flesh stitches that keep skin together and then dissolve inside you — a word that makes sentences make sense in this precious knitted way. What’s Latin.
Butterfly notifications in my dopamine receptors.
Coffee luxuriance and pillowslips ink-stained with diary slumbering. There are too many images trying to bed us. A stage whisper for the saints. I was born from a chrysalis of synths swaddled in melody all the better to tell you.
The discourse is banana-bruised and overly ripe in your bag.
Perfect oracle rosehip tea.
You can’t fully vanquish chaos but on the phone at a planetary scale your mouth an aquarium, spilling numbers.
It’s okay that I died, and you died a little bit that night we all did, really.
A friend is on the phone trying to renew medication. The record-breaking temperatures have lost their meaning, as in a lost glom of mercury swallowed by me. The Butterfly splitfin is in jeopardy. I have never fixed on a form for these cramps in language. The males intensify in colour when excited. The young are entirely silvery. I want to go on the profiles of the gentle ones and swim with them; you don’t need these comments, you didn’t need these things. The internship of being elegant more insect is fading. At some point
I wanted to drive. I was a girl toy and thought of many plastic cassette cases filling up the doors, the backseats with sugar. The idea of analogue as shadow, scrolling magnetic and stopping. I’m glitched by the ache which is lightening, gloss, disquietude, gelid. Girl drivers filling the roads, pouring concrete from their jars of face creams into the sea and beckoning
to make love on the white lines, almost drifting
you were there, you were swimming,
our worlds elided
I wanted to drive you to the sea cliffs of skyward to breakfast on blue.
Natalie and Lana sing of the body California incarnate, plasticity glowing emails, eyeshadow blue as in Bowie
my exospore of the hokum knowhow, excessive sentiment, hearts aglow
That house over there. That home over there. A palm. Analgesia of the sea.
Ghost for your thot
organology of a negative situationship
Catharsis polaroid still develops in my purse of us, you’re blowing out blue smoke in the dream, I’m bowing out. The eye emoji, heart stun soft mote.
And in the darkness…
It’s good to be soft when they push you down
[…]
Such a curse to be so hard
Lightning bolt award for being born at all.
I used to chew beads and often swallow them
C. said so inside you it’s like the anthropocene
many plastiglomerate organ marias
menstruating rainbows
What someone called my emotional Teflon was melted by your white-hot non-logic, almost like heroin of the pain I was in, as if to have a little blister polishing her oysters. Why is there no word for girl-come
or the tragedy of icepacks.
Kept panic-crying at the idea of sleeping
and did it until the blood vessels burst around my eyes
which are sea-coloured and colourless, unseeing.
Divine & oversized teardrop:
I bought this not on etsy but via the estuary, quartz time, I dreamt a skipped ad and heard myself in the rearview mirror bound in leather. Here is a lilac wine and the name of that bone in your chest, flagrant sternum of the lonely highway, pulling your jacket to keep warm
picking pearls off your shoulders, all the better to lick this neck
in the flesh of the road
Bernard Stiegler says the relation entropy/negentropy is really the question of life par excellence
a pair of glowing red eyes
Buying more dreams at the pharmacy
of lurid blue
your poor wee cold sore
sky porn falls into humming. It’s free, it has to be.
Anything lost at the point of service.
There’s so much I wanna say about this album
holding me tight
I wanna tie the lights
and go off to hear it shimmering beneath the moon, whose memory
bruises
rosemary
real blood from your forehead
and the shadow of the one who
was yours
a long plague
season of neutral sensation
new motor neurons at the cosmic dawn
tripping cured my parosmia somewhat I could smell sauerkraut, frying onions, coffee, kerosene my only name the body odour of the shadow you loved
I can’t tell the trees from the shape of lightning
in subtitles
spiralise my love for the seventies
in edible language
flares in the highlands
the problem is not being affectless
but totally loving too much
all the tautology of stardust
let’s take the motorway route to ride our souls
under sunblock and metal sculpture
you feel balmy here, less exposed, fear of
merging
what we are
white hot collision
emotional whiplash
Emerging triumphant the dawn is a fog machine it is only October, none of us a sweetheart neckline could finish the sentence
swishing our way to ceremony
music makes sense
instead: a down & dirty musical set in the world of italicised starlings
which are assholes
because of radiance
for the love of original mud which connotes the whole story
they had to take flight
The body of both selves is ochre like in Husserl the real world is everything
a dialectician of starlight
Morning gluttony. Grasping. A worm in your blessing
fragile apples on the counter / collect to rot.
The real era was gradient and dependent on what Merleau-Ponty calls illness, ‘a complete form of existence’. I lost a normal form but what I found was the shimmer conundrum of the shape of you, California, a rice harvest of shiny red-blue tears to grow a purple flower, you guessed it.
Possession.
Pearly beads, the slasher heartfire of a bold new vision
touching me soft jealous of cornfields
Hellbound in egress, dark glow, December’s acupuncture of clouds.
How can something so big feel so cosy?
The creature is god.
Told myself I’d scrub mould from the bathroom today. Flux glow from the dirt that is given us to know the worst.
A given thing: music is grieving.
I wrap the vine around me in the hope of fruiting, or any violet outcome is fine. You bake a good pastiche like an electric goddess, cancelling plans all the better to scream at the stars. Loop trope. Hold yourself soft or hard, by the collar or hand, by moonlight tripping in Finnieston and in Yorkhill and by the masticated night which is always online in the digest of even the worst ‘The Flower Called Nowhere’
Mothering the subgenre of oblong buildings, bliss our heart this hurt. You essay your way to music but is it not your allergies that crystallise accomplice to the throat of time? Thank you, thank you for the mystery. It’s so late.
And we love this crescent moon
for all intelligence is the art of rupture
Falling asleep at the movies
And I am choking for a sweetness that really sees me.
~
Some italics are lyrics taken from Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow (2022).
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.
ARTIST COLLABORATIONS
‘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 Turbinewith 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: Playwith 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.
ACADEMIC ARTICLES
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.
‘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.
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. 🙂
Pleased to announce a new journal article, ‘Hypercritique: A Sequence of Dreams for the Anthropocene’ is now published as part of Coils of the Serpent’s ISSUE 8 (2021): IM/POSSIBILITY: ON THE PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, AND ARTICULATION OF THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE. With thanks to the editors.
What sort of coming belongs to a dream? Existing suspended, to come, now, is to place impossible faith in the possible: that passion for “something” which answers as closure, fulfilment, echo, return. The conditional tense, “to have given us to believe”, as though this were the very text we were each receiving. And I call you from dreams like the siren, and I am more of each line, the outwards spread which you circle to end, ellipsis, still typing, which you centre but do not settle. The anthropocene, this hypothetical epoch of the lived, the literal extinction, asks us (and could it) to see ourselves coming as pure expenditure, general economy, the discharge of species.1 And so I ate the lure and let me go.
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.
Announcing a new anthology I’ve been working on with the wonderful Rhian Williams and indie publishers Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Copies are now available to order…
Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams and with a foreword by Tim Morton, the weird folds intervenes in more traditional canons of nature and ecopoetry to offer a poetics of the anthropocene which is thoroughly generous, queer, sensuous, formally innovative, relational, occult, fugitive and critically sensitive to the mediations of technology and culture which shape our encounters with the more-than-human.
NOTE: If cover images are missing from any of the above links, please be aware that the books are still available for purchase.
Pages: 296 Dimensions: B Format ISBN: 978-1838015619 Cat No: DW-001-97 Imprint: Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals Publishing Model: Tailored
The Author
Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams and with a foreword from Timothy Morton), the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene features contributors working at the intersections of lyric, cultural critique and hybrid forms. The contributors in order are: Pratyusha, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Jay G Ying, Sarah Cave, Samantha Walton, Rebecca Tamás, Daisy Lafarge, Jane Hartshorn, Francesca Lisette, Max Parnell, Calum Rodger, Miranda Cichy, Alice Tarbuck, fred spoliar, Iain Morrison, Gloria Dawson, Vahni Capildeo, Sascha Akhtar, Fred Carter, Katy Lewis Hood and Therese Keogh, montenegro fisher, Nat Raha, Mike Saunders, Jane Goldman, Harriet Tarlo, Rosie Roberts, Lila Matsumoto, Colin Herd, Paul Hawkins, nicky melville, Kat Sinclair, Nasim Luczaj.
Praise
This vital gathering tells slanted anthropocenic truths, re-cognising the manifold everyday as a crucial space-time of enquiry, excavation and entanglement. Performing kaleidoscopic arts of noticing, the works within these pages render traces of a changed and changing planet with tangible immediacy. Here is poetry as a barometer of the times.
-Mandy Bloomfield, author of Archaeopoetics: Word, Image, History (University of Alabama Press, 2016)
These are poems of the future glimpsed through its shards and fragments here and now – they are unhomely and familiar, revealing a skewed new normal: they are fieldnotes from a world to come.
-David Borthwick, Lecturer in Environmental Literature at University of Glasgow
Anthropocene is the impact human beings have on the planet, while the trillions of cells making each human body are composed entirely of the fire, soil, air, and water of the earth. In this anthology, the poets are voices for a war the planet is having with itself through its human bodies, and I am very grateful for their reports. I wonder if it is unfair to think of poets as war correspondents, but this book proves we are possibilities for so much more.
–CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017)
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