Tag: writing

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:

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

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!

wrote this on christmas day

Snowkiss 

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

Claire de Luna


☾

Claire de Luna
For Alex

Just found a sequin in my cup of tea
now stuck to the organ
grinding medicine of the morning 
after Claire de Luna declares it 
licking the inside shot
of tequila 
like antediluvians
lining the seabed with SSRIs
did somebody say “free margaritas”
I want to love the salt-rimming margins 
of reading the poem 
liquefied drunk lilac of loving

Smashed the disco piñata of my brain 
just to feel something
logistical about happiness
Blake says “eternity is in love
with the productions of time”
which is why we celebrate birthdays
for age verification under the name
of human nature 
like nobody puts baby on the carousel
ouch, taking half of the pill you are
horse girl summer.

*

Nobody at the wedding was on their phone.
I think we should get married more often,
why not do it over and over
licensed a la carte of loving 
lightning bolts 
drawn on James
that’s how it starts
surrendering mood to the iPod shuffle of the noughties 
what monoculture still plays in thine ears is radio
weight like watching your life salve 
lip-syncing grace of plenitude
tattooed on our ankles
tomorrow I travel 499 miles to witness 
meltwater
come into song.

Julia Cameron says god has a lot of money.
Did Kanye read The Artist’s Way?
Junk bond celestine of autumn goldenness
doesn’t glow like it used to, cash in my pocket
starts to burn ecological moonlighting ruins
on the basis of cigarettes in process
light nutrient water recycling
boosts the release of serotonin from the pre-
synaptic cell party hiya
stuffed pistachio cookie ether,
either way. Drink up baby.

I’m so in love with my friends 
it might become a problem
doing star jumps to 
‘Sugar We’re Going Down’ 
like holding sparklers too close
to the sky, they start 
to think they’re shooting stars.

*

Alex is a gender-neutral name of Greek origin
meaning “defender of humankind”
which is why they sent you to fuck
the anthropocene so hard it turns
to seafoam. 

O God of Wine
lush chromosomes of sleep adequacy 
fill my eyelids with orange
dreamt sexuality of star speak
Yasi is reading Kierkegaard and I’m crying finally
alien pixels of being dumb
emotional girl clutter
surfing the internet permafrost 
people called me a living sim 
supervised by Anna Tsing
I was salon assistant to the 
sadness device 
of forest massage.

It cost so much to let go 
of her leaving.

*

The apocalypse is stylised polyester.
You are wearing a dress of flame and
burning up that slay would leave no
fire behind you, white
hot praxis 
rats with necklaces
of satellite dishes
beam me up softly
to want Carhartt durable 
rent stabilised limbo
of being a work in progress 
touched luminous thot
climbing the ladder charisma

I was told a wild case of golden goose 
bumps a literal golden goose
prone to memorising pop songs
buying shares in Ethereum
stomach pain from the ice crush
of so many bruises.

*

Still going strong in the life morning 
beautiful four-leaf lovers
queen of the lit department
trying to learn 
Luna checking the pee mail of the neighbourhood canines:
Bruce woz ere,
Peanut sayz hi 
I ❤ Keats etc.

*

I mean the kind of snack that happens
upon you, loves you back
happy birthday
foreverie golden surrounds 
finish the cookie to keep the peace
trebuchet of personality
the shape of how I love them is inexplicable 
like math fruit of loving itself 
Cinderace soccer ball of kicking fire 
up in car headlights just to write this
adrenaline voice note 
of Caroline’s hopedrunk everlasting encore 
volcano of yasssified gender

our bar in Berlin translates as 
COMRADE
NEST 3000
playing disco vintage of parataxis 
like putting the word ‘no’ in a poem
as if to image the jagged edge of 
snowflakes snagged in my 
curriculum vitae of oesophageal 
rupture like
hi, a career.

I’ll add that 
to the ADHD craft graveyard 
of my personal sabotage
email embroidery
flavour of the meadow 
we’re in for a bit.
I like having a reason
to be a little 
invisible
dabbing the blue idea 
of what you said 
people should 
scunnersome
boycott
the grade device until they realise
intelligence is weather dependent.

*

I was my own sister
kissed forehead 
a server farm
of purloined bog myrtle
from which 
distress is the same 
gaping brilliantly not 
like a wound just a knot
in a tree made of cloud
as you said of 
ceremony’s gigabyte largesse
gone into orb 
tomorrow
wear something comfortable
and look HOT
out in the plasmatron 
reality holism. 

*

Happy birthday, but like
in four-dimensional waltz time
trying my altitude regret
I stay really high in the hero stage
doing Barbie parkour 
while someone smokes
blunts out the infra-
twilight of being alive
with y’all so much 
spinning around 
flowers in the 
pouring rain
getting lit
lit, lit, lit:
let them 
eat chips.

— September 2023

Weekend workshop: The Poetry of Somnolence

Hey pals!

Announcing a 2-part weekend workshop ‘The Poetry of Somnolence’ with Beyond Form Creative Writing.

Take this workshop to explore the radical, rhythmic & world-traversing poetics of sleep, whatever your creative practice!

Saturday and Sunday November 11th and 12th

1-4pm (GMT) via Zoom

​😴

This 2 part series of afternoon workshops prioritise the relationship between writing and sleep. Exploring cross-genre writing, visual and sonic art, we will look at how daily writing practice can recentre our circadian rhythms. From hypnagogic poetics to dream writing, nocturnal missives, dawn songs and notes on twilight, we’ll consider experimental approaches to writing somnolence. All creatives welcome.

Workshop format will combine reading, writing, listening, optional discussion and two nap breaks. Reading will be provided in digital format (pdf or weblinks) ahead of the session.

For more info, price and enquiries head here.

expandable pets

Daily writing prompt
Dogs or cats?
View all responses

Lately they’d been doing this thing of pretending they were walking the dog. Which dog? Obviously the dog. The dog would appear alongside them kind of grown from original emoji like those tiny dinosaurs, flowers or anime characters you used to get in stockings at Christmas, the ones you add water to then they expand with superabsorbent polymer to become a whole other thing. Idk what the dog was expanding with, some air of affection. It was lonely to walk around the abandoned railway lines and through underpasses and along by the retail park and up by the meadowing verge of the motorway. It was lonely to eat litter. It was lonely to squish shadows into predators and gull cries into opulent music. Having a dog you were present and obvious. People stopped to say the dog was beautiful and so were you, pet.

Cats cry in the mouths of children and follow them home. They take the canal route without listening to father and collect tiny yellow flowers so to eat bitter all the more sweetly. Cats had a feel for waywardness. Poised for the kill. Whispered: don’t work. Cats hated the water and their orientation was always away from the canal and towards the city. Cats took upon the gulls at night, like the mushroom controlling the ants, and this is how they learned how to fly. You’re a child right? Ofc you’ll follow.

Alex G, God Save the Animals in Glasgow

God Save the Animals is a classic phrase, haunted by punk royalty and the entropy of petrol leaks in the garden growing flowers. Keep saying god as a speech act for staying, something I’ve always wanted. Being watered by the idea of voice. Like to wake up and in the morning you’re still here, watching over me I’m sleeping in the magazine with the gloss on my face. Like I want pop to shoot me for ecstasy blanks, it’s just who I am. I love it. I love Alex G. Last night I saw him play with Momma at SWG3, Glasgow, and he rattled through the hits in this dancey elemental way of just seducing all of us. No fan heckling bs. Last time I saw him was with D. and S. back in February 2020, time of portent, a delicious and messy set at Saint Luke’s where I said something to N. about the Joker fan club and all the young dudes, I liked being them sort of going insane in the moment before getting really close to the mic and losing everything. I liked being an idiot for Alex’s music. Do good noise.

It gives me this lofi permission to love love songs. Like I’m always stretched out on the bed of that flat in Finnieston I don’t remember the names of clouds just a starfish oversized in my hair I passed around, the starfish, we kept saying the celebrities we looked like vaguely and we listened to 2016. It felt like I could drink all the mysteries and stay sober, purple-lipped in the mirror just excited to get back from washing my hands to talk. There was a big feeling about that gig that was matched by how everyone seemed in this swathe of guitar haze, choose today, watching the little plonk piano riffs kind of imagining the whole thing composed on Casio and you know the sense of it — thrill of what happens when the bedroom sensation is blown up, squared, riven with song. I kept wanting to see what he was doing.

There are rooms where I can’t hang my head
There are tears that I can’t cry
In the years you feel the most alone
You will build the walls I climb

                                                (Alex G, ‘After All’)

These impossible places and water that exists and time folded into them addressing this to god I don’t know but I feel it with angels like sentences themselves are messengers, hi. They have many eyes and the grammar of wings. I’m here, on my tip toes. The plea to save animals is like determined ‘the’ and over there but nevertheless I’m one of them, aren’t you? We’re cowardly and in love with music, so much we climb the walls of it. We’re stronger than water. We’re blood and bone. Climbing all over the walls of each other to say something. I wanted to hold hands through golden trellises ascent to innocence, no bitterness, we had all these years the same thing, it made us children. We grew sideways over the same secret, screaming falsetto.

Break miracles to gold dust and be again.

So much of the gig felt like thanks. Thanks to the named ones and thanks to the animals. Thanks for honesty. There was this weird proggy encore that sucked us back into the sky castles of the past. Earlier, I can’t remember which song it is, but there’s a piano stem that sounds like playing Sims to me. I said to J. “welcome to Pleasantview”. We were all listening to build something, what can I say, looking for tiles through which to place our confusions. I jumped into the Pitchfork review of God Save the Animals, with its red juicy 8.4, and was thrilled to see the article open with a reference to Derrida’s essay The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow) – that shower scene with the cat staring back at you. I kind of didn’t realise how many dogs haunt Alex G songs. Feel it all. Thanks to the dogs and cats. A BACKWARDS GOD. You’re cool man. 

I feel like the songs keep me safe. I listened to them lots last year wanting to believe in something over and over again like to remake domesticity in the image of ocean, everything deep below like texts swimming around in the sunlight zone of my dreams, afraid to go further down and darker. You can leave it to me. I crossed fields for you. I called you baby baby. I kept this diary. The fields were kelp and basalt and blessing. I wanted to be in a band where we could use gravity to please listen, gift refrains. Momma the support were ace too. They played Californian indie rock of feeling good and fuck it slacker. I liked the zillennial vibe with the irony and sincerity of quotation at work in the heavy guitars and crushy vocals of mirror fry, having a good time. I’m every virtual scenario. The three-minute frisson is perfect. Still shimmering hyper-economy of Alex’s piano which is movies you watch at three am to make them poem perfect, cast aslant and barely remembered. Right now baby I’m struggling, we’ll see.

I had a copy of Dana Ward’s first collection in my little Work is Over tote, still rain crinkled from weeks ago. The bouncer at SWG3 said he was a bookworm as he searched my bag and approved of the title of Dana’s book like it wholly explained the world. That felt a good omen. This Can’t Be Life! Well, what can it be! Let’s see!  

First Day

My first day at language was painful – wasn’t yours?

Comprehension passages were my forest experience, sexual discovery etc. Why was that girl stealing seeds?

First day as a tree, first day as a ginger. Quality of energy and tying your laces at crotch-level or solar adornment. Ugh. I never did learn to tan. I was always raining.

First day as a patient.

Write a detailed analysis of the means by which the writer captures a moment in time.

Aye for an aye.

Frozen trachea. Osteoporosis of form.

Don’t you understand the poem has to mean something? I mean it always does?

You are lucky if you wrote your name on a tree in 1993
because now it is nearly thirty years old
and the wound persists
a loose idea.

Didn’t you do it too?

I was a loose leaf

a marigold, love-in-the-mist
or simple bean.

Sap-hot.

All out of luck.

First word was duck

duck goose.