Tag: book launch

I don’t have things to tell you x Centrefolding

Saturday 21st November at 7pm
Mount Florida Books, Glasgow

Join us for the launch of I don’t have things to tell you (Strange Region, 2027), a collaborative epistolary collection of poetry by Mau Baiocco and Maria Sledmere. We are also celebrating the second edition of Kirsty Dunlop’s Centrefolding, also with Strange Region. The event will feature readings from all three authors, plus a conversation between Mau and Maria.

Tickets available from Mount Florida Books, here.

Written as letters to one another between 2022-25, I don’t have things to tell you charts the development of a shared creative form, a currency of intimate exchange born of longing and companionship.

Combining documentary with diaristic insight, Mau and Maria rehearse their nostalgia for the lived moment. The poets discuss their encounters with art and conversations with friends. They recall dreams, architecture and sicknesses of the body and mind. Moving through metaphysical enquiry, acid Romanticism, wishlists and the ephemera of everyday life, they write towards a theory of living in unbelievable times. These poems are documents of culture at precise, dated moments. Portraits of loneliness, self-sabotage, mirror-selves. They contain birthday wishes, celestial visions, alchemical descriptions of literature, dream reports, news items and psychogeographical tangents.

These poems are channels of thought and energy between Leeds and Glasgow, and between digital and corporeal versions of oneself. They reflect a yearning to map the interior of poetic community, to write love into existence, and to construct a shareable future motivated by friendship.

In Centrefolding, an unnamed protagonist shifts, sprints, swerves and transmorphs through the “Centre!” (exclamation mark required), a research institute in some northern British city, in our current jittery moment. Glitches in reality abound: expect research into alien life that goes nowhere, an underground hospital, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and ‘lingerers’ slithering under glass doors (you know, like a worm).

Mau Baiocco is the author of The Resting Acrobats (Monitor, 2023) living in Leeds. They have worked as an editor for SPAM zine, organised the Leeds Poetry Studio and original poetry and translations have appeared on Tripwire, Datableed, Amberflora and Firmament, among others.

Maria Sledmere is a poet-scholar, artist and lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. She is managing editor at SPAM Press, one half of the performance duo Project Somnolence and the author of over twenty print publications including The Indigo Hours (Broken Sleep, 2025), Languishing, cute – with Ian Macartney (Tapsalteerie, 2025), Midsummer Song (Hypercritique) (Tenement Press, 2024), Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024) and An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023). She has been published in Jacket2, The Stinging Fly, Fallow, Blush, Prototype, Postmodern Cultures, Magma and elsewhere.

Kirsty Dunlop is a multimedia writer, editor, researcher and musician, based in Glasgow. She has a doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow, exploring the possibilities of hybrid New Media writing and glitchful experiments through her concept of ‘Emergent Essaying’. She regularly leads workshops and gives talks on digital hybrid forms and is a freelance Games Developer. Her practice encompasses fiction, poetics, non-fiction and the hybrid essay, alongside code and performance. She is Editor-in-Chief of SPAM Press. Centrefolding is her debut novella, originally published by Sincere Corkscrew, now out with Strange Region.

Working at Footlocker

Tonight was the book launch for Tom Byam Shaw’s new short story collection, You Are Going to Regret This. Despite Storm Amy, Mount Florida Books was packed which is always so good to see (stay tuned as we’ll hopefully have another SPAM launch there before the year is out!). Tom read some pieces from the book — extracts from ‘Retail’ and ‘Arcana’. In conversation with Ian Macartney they talked about the New Weird, monstrosities and cannibalism as metaphors for capitalism, the world falling apart while people shop, continuity vs cataclysm, hauntology, real stories, Aberdeen, Glasgow, the Anderston motorway underpass (also a soft spot for me though I’m also partial to the Cowcaddens). They talked about a time when the Aberdeen open mic scene was so saturated there would be like seven different nights to choose from and regular performers would become minor local celebs. The shaping of each others’ work (both were members of the Re-Analogue art collective). At one point the word nice was said in a spiralling, elliptical comic-sweet way — I think they were reflecting on earlier days of friendship — and Katia was like this is nice ! bringing us into the present, that’s the point. The book looks great and sincere corkscrew really pulled a good number on the design. It will probably lure you into the basement which will smell of brand new trainers and you will have to confront something terrible. Everyone kept saying ‘for fans of Alison Rumfitt’. Yeah!

Afterwards we bandied out to The Ivory Hotel and with key questions bundled from some poetic eavesdropping of K’s café memories, I made people talk about the what and why of poetry, lifting these questions wholesale from said memories. Maybe having ‘a night off’ from poetry put me in this mood. Thanks to all who contributed. Everything was Guinness-flavoured and first thought.

J., Z. and K. shared their childhood guinea pig stories and we swapped anecdotes of encounters with rats (at home and in the workplace). The sorrow of a tiny animal curled around the absence of another.

Now the wind howls at the window.