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.
neutral milky halo loops around the pixelated tempos, imaginaries and myths of this fraught, contingent moment. Poems of weird ecology, cultivated address and tendering detail; poems of disorientation, hospitality, sounding and shimmer. Poems seen through screens, reflected on or refracted from glass; poems seen-through and poems making visible the otherwise shadowed. Poems that envelop the animal, the flower, the technologies of writing and other means of resistance, expression and growth. Weaving the everyday ‘scenes’ of the anthropocene — from starry cosmologies of new gods, months and seasons, to kissable forests and the ice cream trucks that haunt our quarantine — neutral milky halo draws fragile yet glistening socialities for dreaming between ‘thick’ futures.
Pamphlet / 184 x 140mm / 44pp / Mohawk Superfine papers & sparkly pink end papers / ISBN 978-1-913749-09-5.
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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