Calling all ye poetry scamps: join us for the launch of a new Tapsalteerie anthology on Burns Night (25th January).
Sleekit: Contemporary poems in the Burns stanza
Sleekit: Contemporary poems in the Burns stanza, edited by Lou Selfridge,collects recent poetry in the form by some of the most exciting poets writing in Scotland today. Here are poems which conform to the structure of the Burns stanza alongside poems which seek to stretch and twist it; poems in Scots, English, and JavaScript; poems on topics as diverse as buffalypso, sex toys, and Robert Burns himself. The work in Sleekit shows the vital role the Burns stanza plays in contemporary Scottish poetry.
Joining us to read we have Stephen Dornan, Roshni Gallagher, Josie Giles, David Kinloch, Simon Lamb, Iain Morrison, Jeda Pearl, Calum Rodger, Maria Sledmere, Gill Shaw, Stewart Sanderson & Kate Tough,with an introduction from Sleekit editor Lou Selfridge too!
One of the exciting things about running a small press publisher is discovering new forms of poetry at the same time as totally falling in love with them. Like finding a long, lustrous hair at the end of the pencil and falling in love with it so much to spiralise your day around its protein. Like hearing a song on the radio first thing in the morning brain. What I mean to say is, poets are shedding all the time and sometimes you really want to be there, hospitably, in the moment of language leaving itself beautifully there.
Growing, shedding.
On 31st January, SPAM are releasing Thirteen Morisettes, a transatlantic communion between Courtney Bush and Jack Underwood, a 60-page book of lyrics and epistles which centre around the poets’ love of Alanis Morisette. Our eponymous chanteuse haunts the lyrical plazas of Woolwich Market, university corridors and Starbucks. It’s great to have a collaboration which feels like a true collaboration: the interweaving of voices, in-jokes, playful telepathy.
The Morisette itself is a new form developed by Jack and Courtney. The authors define it as:
The primary constraint of the Morisette is that its lines are formed out of the deliberate mis-transcribing of Alanis Morisette lyrics. The Morisette is (usually) comprised of two mis-transcribed verses, followed by a mis-transcribed chorus to end the poem.
The epistolary, then, is not just a mode of transmission but of listening. At the light speed of however many G’s we wish to bestow upon the airwaves, Jack and Courtney have made an ambience of their poetic communiqué and like the desire for better worlds we sublimate in the village of our most familiar coffee chains, typing away into elsewhere, they form a sort of pop-chorus-corridor across the Atlantic. I fucking love it. I hope you will too.
The book is available to preorder for £8 now.
SPAM TOUR:
Courtney and Jack will be reading on the following dates:
6th February – Instagram Live (@spamzine)
13th February – Glasgow (venue tbc)
15th February – Peckham Pelican, London (along with Eve Esfandiari-Denney,Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, Jack Young
16th February – Bookhaus, Bristol (Courtney only – along with Jack Young, me and Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir)
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:
Voilà! 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! Voilà! 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
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).
Hello it’s dark down here like a deck of cards or a memoir I don’t know how I got to the deep sweet part of the year it’s not like heavenly bubblewrap beginning again unboxed study of presence I was a higher monstrosity before all of you paroxysmal the actress had weird nipples that’s not why the film moved me so much I loved the psychosis of numbers falling in love with them close your eyes and count down from ten on a bike in traffic like tulip for a tongue everyone will love you on the count of zero calorie infinity this year we got so sick crying over ourselves in bathtubs of colder water we were too wet in our minds for god to slice machine language I learned to sleep like a baby which is to say cryingly I learned to sleep like a dead man playing dead with microdosed indifference to the way it breathes I’m not blowing up rumours of balloon with my labour the university can engineer balladry funding like the man who made millions from his gold rush ballads made more from the ballads than the gold I learned this while bowling I am terrible at bowling the way a heavy weight slings from my arm the let go of holding each other in public pieces of art gallery candy arranged by the window a hundred storeys high above sea level at maximum emotional altitude today it’s not going to get any lighter I won’t feel tender towards a petty listener monologue of the star topping forest says go harder fly faster in the face of despair don’t spit the gallery candy fungible in glib ways like on eBay buying up the tears of Britney who danced with knives on reels available to anyone
There’s no need to be afraid this Christmas the landlords are all gone home to their mums in outer suburbia we can’t get turkey, mistletoe or snow on credit any more than poetry will get us into the club of our dreams on the bus gone very hot and fast to bed instead with the new living elves of a breadline
Grown livid in labouring pains for kids at the sonnet workshop wanting to sit on the same old future’s necrotic knee would it not be lovely to make a bid adoring sentiment this counterfeit O kisses of ownership set us free
I am going to be in New York(!) for a few days in December, doing some readings with a motley crew of Scottish poets: Colin Herd, Jane Goldman, Iain Morrison, Nicky Melville.
So far, confirmed events are:
Sunday 17th, 12-3pm – Scottish Poetry Brunch at Torn Page. RSVP.
Monday 18th, 6:30-8pm – Poetry: A Christmastime Gathering with Four Scottish Poets at Frenchtown Bookshop. More info.
If you have any recommendations of cool things happening between the 16-21st of December in NY, hit me up!
Our home is on fire and our houses unmade. When climate change is also (as Margaret Atwood puts it) ‘everything change’, how might poetry reckon with the far-reaching implications and existential contradictions of environmental crisis? In this panel discussion, we ask what tools exist for poetry to retune our senses, coexist with multiple species, tell stories of deep time while envisioning resilient and resistant communities. Our three poets will explore key strands into a climate-responsive poetics: elemental, collaborative, mindful, wild. With close attention to form and language, we discuss practical, ethical and poetic interventions in ecological thought.
mariaology 