Tag: KRUPSKAYA

cute entry // yellow tulips

cute entry / / yellow tulips
London, April 2024

I was out somewhere reciting my love for Adidas with wishes thrice – dĂ©colletage! – and music, the train arrived on time. I wanted to ask about your shoulder and you said there was so much Guinness after the football, the rest of the world was a rumour. We had all these non-sequiturs to like, communicate the fizzy little spirals. I was like an ice cream sky for you! A spring-rush blossom you! Tapering, tapering. Went to buy salad from downstairs, went to run around putting jeans on. New jeans. Matte suede lips. Blue Sunday. Covent Garden was glistening with consumerism and the new good weather. Every time I’m in London it’s sunnier, warmer, more deniable; so much the smell of pollution & impossible flowers, pollution & impossible flowers
the city I really learned to love was so expensive you could only love so much before the money felt
mouth garbage
of gorgeous surplus:
What I kept feeling about London was…what I had kept of something & nothing a type of ‘neutral metabolic beverage’ bought at room temperature in the clothing store – spontaneous purchase!
Questions to fall in love to……what’s your favourite checkout compulsion? To shoplift gum? To flirt with cashier? To buy an oaten flute and play it to god? I was so concerned about the woman in Asda with the bleeding nailbeds and I kept recommending apricot oil and lots of sleep, I’d been through it too, and my Nan from the chemo. What our nails tell us. Mine used to be silver striped and blood-let-violet, now they are cracked with the memory.

The rain came out the day I went home. Lucky I got to bring my book to London. Oh god it was beautiful the matinee I was nervously also on Guinness and lots of intersections of arrival, read first, took ponytail out like to say she is me now. Cinders. The night before, D. and I had gone to see some bands at the George Tavern and we talked through a few sets just because it had been so long since we’d talked and I wanted to know all about work and love and she said something amazing about how it gets better every day, like you just want to find out so much about the person, you want to figure out the total every degree of how they think and what they feel about something – this plenitude. I said that to my friend last night like the thing about a successful relationship is surely that every day it gets better in that you change together, you change each other, you discover things about yourself that would irrevocably not be possible to discover unless you met this person and you change each other’s day and daily and that’s not like tree branches curled around each other it’s more like mycelia underground, so much unseen, more like alchemy. So when you break apart, you never really sever. You are cellular bonded. Their energy surges in you – what – a bus ride home, a voice note, a quiet cry in the night. Something said, something unspoken. Unexpected holding of hands. Curly little yes.

*

I reread The Hour of the Star over breakfast sauerkraut and the flicker of lighter-light out at the end was it. So easy ideation; not to say I made plans, just that the impulse had become my little sister. You have to find your light.

I was lighting up to go to the next thing.

‘Beautiful though it is, it’s just walking really,’ said the woman behind me on the train, talking about the countryside.

She also said:

  1. 99% of people who study to be dentists end up being dentists
  2. 99% of people who study art don’t end up being artists

My brother and I stay up til 2am listening to hardstyle and reminiscing 2000s absurdism like it’s our good soft history and I suppose it is. Castles in the sky, pretty green eyes, quiver, save me, braveheart, moonlight, sunshine after the rain, bits and pieces, concrete angel, true love never dies.

I want to exhibit gelatinous entrails of everything we ever said.

*

Someone not new I met again talked about making love in a cornfield, listening to Sting. That the not-not-new of it all shared love for Eva Cassidy broke a little nerve platonism so much that I would melt into what we made awhile. Nightcap. Fortuitous timing of trains.

J. said I looked about twelve in the picture. I said this is my heartwood: surly, surly.

The readings:

Jane’s brilliant poise – poetry delivers the body.
Ellis’s infinite – I was so elated to meet them finally ❤
Rob’s plasma poems enamoured and the fuck devastation of elegy.
Karenjit’s percussive grace.

The readings were gems I will live with. I took videos but for some reason couldn’t upload them anywhere, but I have them.

Noodles at Silk Road backscattering miso. Hospitality stories. Stafford yellow fields. Lambs around Penrith.

Intimate fish tank of the Zoom reading with my Krupskaya label mates. I nearly read with the AR halo. Two in one day.

I slept thick treacle.

“kept swelling with the sense of this year as the best, it keeps getting better”
“wonderful”
“Oh rly?”

The other maria.

Cinders in London

Thrilled to be bringing the Cinders ball to London for a lil matinee at Peckham Pelican on Sunday 14th April. I’ll be accompanied by a dream line-up. There will be books for sale (card only). Hope to see you there!

Event starts at 2pm and will be finished by 5pm.

Entry is free and unticketed.

Accessibility:

The Peckham Pelican is a ground level venue with step-free access, gender neutral and disabled toilets. You can find out more about the venue here.

Readers:

Jane Hartshorn is a poet and PhD candidate at the University of Kent, writing about the lived experience of chronic illness. Her pamphlets include Blowfly (in collaboration with ossa prints), Soft Tissue Rarely Preserves (in collaboration with Valeska Noemi), In the Sick Hour (Takeaway Press, 2020) and Tract (Litmus Publishing, 2017). Her work has been published by Footnote Press, Boudicca Press, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Lucy Writers, The Polyphony, and SPAM. She is founder of CHASE Medical Humanities Network and teaches poetry to medical students at University of Southampton. @jeahartshorn janehartshorn.weebly.com

Robert Kiely is the author of ROB, Gelpack Allegory, and simmering of a declarative void. He is an editor at veer books.

Karenjit Sandhu’s publications include Poetic Fragments from the Irritating Archive (Guillemot Press), young girls! (the87Press) and Baby 19 (intergraphia books). Her practice comprises poetry, performance and artists’ books. She is a member of the British Art Network and Lecturer in Art at the Reading School of Art.

Suzanna Slack is the author of Happy Birthday Story, Is This It?, The Poor Children, The Shedding, Luxury Profile, White Spirit Videotelephony and Gummi Zone.  Their work has been published by Solstis Literary Magazine, Datableed, Hot Pink Literary Magazine and others.  They are seeking assistance with their next work!

Maria Sledmere is the author of books including Cinders (Krupskaya), An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press) and Visions & Feed (HVTN Press). She is managing editor of SPAM Press and a Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde.

New book: Cinders

I’ve been excited about this for a long time: my U.S. debut and new poetry collection, Cinders, is forthcoming with KRUPSKAYA Books!

I started writing Cinders in 2019. In some ways, this feels like the most worked-through, shape-shifting and elemental thing I’ve written. It’s also a bit crazy, let loose, poet in residence at the wind farm energy.

Its main epigraphs are these:

About the book

Cinders is a perverse and hybrid reimagining of Jacques Derrida’s 1987 book of the same name and the rags-to-riches fairy tale, Cinderella, set against anthropocene mythoscapes of deep time, haunted leisure plazas and terraformed Mars.

Cinders retells an old tale about lateness–how late is it, is it too late, what are the stakes of being too late if it is too late. This lateness, in Sledmere’s visionary lyric poems, pervades the structures and strictures of the pop dystopias and erotic utopias she studies: gender, class, geography, space–inner and outer. The very elements of Cinderella that were there all along as the wood burned to ash in the hearth.

Jeff Clark of the amazing Crisis Studio did a really great job on the cover, which has an accidental nod to the drapery of Cixous’ Hyperdream (one of my favourite books in the world) and whose ash curls are from a real incident of burning the avatar of the tale herself.

I am grateful to Sophie Collins, Colin Herd and Douglas Pattison for reading earlier drafts, and to Brandon Brown, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Stephanie Young for being such amazing, enthusiastic and thorough editors ❤

Here are some nice things people have said about the book:

VoilĂ ! There she flies! Cinders! Sledmere’s ribboning red hot femme lyric avatar neither yet soot nor fire, always already hearthless, always already combustible, floating out on the thermals of volatile, flammable, scorching lyrics, trailing clouds of glorious derridean cinder-signals. Imagine lying with Plath’s red-haired Lady Lazarus and Celan’s ashen-haired Shulamith, moon-eyed sisters in anthropocene’s burned-out basement, knowing we are stardust, golden, indeed carbon, but with no way back to the garden and only high contempt for the billionaire boys’ silver spaceships in that yellow haze of the sun (‘this isn’t the journey’)—who do we call? Who ‘singing this tale of the comet’ is going to ‘come for you, little/ burning world’? Cinders! There she flies! VoilĂ ! Poetry coming out of her like lava. Read it, sisters, and swoon. Now listen for that glass slipper to drop then splinter.
— Jane Goldman

Maria Sledmere sneaks up on you. In language that is deceptively intimate and often playful she limns a world of dark, sharp corners, where ecological catastrophe no longer looms but makes itself felt in every aspect of daily life. Intricate and expansive, never alighting on the expected, the poems in Cinders are both gems and bombs. A subtle stunner of a book.
— Anahid Nersessian

I’m planning to be in the Bay Area in May 2024 to launch Cinders with fellow KRUPSKAYA poets Jennifer Soong and Noah Ross at Small Press Traffic, but also look out for an online and Glasgow launch earlier on. The book’s publication date is 12th February 2024, just in time for Valentine’s. Please get in touch with the publisher if you would like to review, stock or whatever!

Some poems in the book have been published already in places including trilobite and the Pilot Press anthology, Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) (2022).

Preorder here!