Mau Baiocco // Kyle Lovell // Maria Sledmere
[56 pp. // A5 // Perfect-bound // Run of 100 // 17/04/2021]
Announcing the first of four seasonal pamphlets of sonnets, written in collaboration with Mau Baiocco and Kyle Lovell.
Available to order now at £6 inc. UK P&P.
~
Praise for Lemon Bloom Season
Like a liquid prisoner pent in glass, I once thought the sum total of human ingenuity was Fanta Grape. And then I read this collection, the perfect expression of what it means to write your poems in the mouths of your friends (as I think Derrida said). You know the part of a poem that stays at the bottom of the bottle, collects as crystallising residue? If you read these poems out loud for long enough, the sounds train your tongue to flicker in there like a lizard and the why of the world just fizzes and melts.
– Colin Herd, author of You Name It (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019)
Of all sciences, is our Hooch poet found at the highest. For they doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any person to enter into it; nay, they doth as if your journey should lie through a fair orchard—at the very first give you a cluster of lemons that, full of that taste, you may long to pass further.
– Sir Philip Sidney, author of An Apology for Poetry
When put to our focus group, seven out of nine consumers agreed that the tasting notes for Lemon Bloom Season were long, smooth, and ‘distinctively yellow in its language’. One consumer attempted to quote Roland Barthes. Another consumer attempted to put forward a new theory of ‘Bitter Poetics’, before being given some more Lemon Bloom Season sonnets. Everyone was glad.
– Philomena Zest, SMOOCH™ CEO
Playlist from Hooch Launch Party
Sample Poems
(...the consequences of becoming nocturnal & the rhythm of headache echoes...)
Sithwards in mourning
the fragments gather
in all honest, most freight
of fettered words, the stand-back
moving the lilac sky
in all smoke and other smells
of ethereal peat and parking meters
such numbers as sweetness
would ring the bell like sparkling
to scratch the gravel
in bumps upon skinnish silk
all dappled pinks still flushed
and spiked with light
and lime-soured gin
the fairies come in original sin
and this the last cigarette
eked out an emotion
ingredient
for the summer potion
loved by all, the randomness of things
in rhythm of
night-walked sorrow so
narrowed by sharp dark shadows
and concrete walls such birth
of a cold remainder
each day
coming for more of the same
and cars
make out their absinthe stares
as if to signal
they were never there
clanging in the homeward slink
of lost epiphanies, the gatherings
to such phials of regret
cracked fast on the paving
to see the people leaving
the music spilling
and everything a flashing amber
ready to be torn asunder.
mariaology 