Midsummer Song / Hypercritique

Maria Sledmere

(eds.) Benjamin Pickford
& Dominic J. Jaeckle

Tenement Press / No University Press #2
978-1-7393851-7-0
469pp

£22.50

 ORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE 

Published 30th September 2024



Midsummer Song intermingles a lodestar of potent poetic sources into a lyric architecture which refuses to be singular in form or bound by convention. This book is plural—at once an elegy for our world—and also—seance and party you won't want to miss. Your tools, dear reader, include countless luminary texts, summer light while it lasts, meadows, cinders, glass, and clairvoyance. Can the poet be everywhere? If nuance is purple and writing is light, this book may convince us that dream space is the necessary elixir to take with us into impermanence, bursting with everything in the world, an ecstatic catalogue and a devastated delirium. Like Christensen's alphabet, this book at once beams and cautions—like a horn of plenty spiraling out from the ear of Athena, a cornucopia of Sledmere's poetic powers. No other poet can make me feel giddy at the end of the world, gorgeous with intimate tears and flight. Descendants of Bernadette Mayer rejoice—now at long last we can dream not only the winter's dark but also in summers blindingly bright. Like when we climb into the red- / threaded spiderweb / of another plague year / and we activate the starlight / stimulus package / in thermotaxis.

Laynie Browne

How does one write speak or dream in the face of climate change, extinction threats and intensifying resource depletion? Midsummer Song offers a lyrical, intense and lamentful dream for an increasingly fragile future. Beautifully composed and plaintively expressed, this poetic essay also hints at an ethics for a precarious future.

Claire Colebrook

^{Left—Sledmere, portrait.
Right—From Jerome Hiller’s Words of Mercury (2011) .}


Wholeness is loose and temporary—————a kind of fog. 

Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun

In the dark times 
Will there also be singing? 
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’


Maria Sledmere’s Midsummer Song—an autopoietic almanack of disambiguated ideas, a pale fire of a poem—is a spiralling work of scholarship that, oriented around the axis of this single ‘song,’ argues a curling grammatology of nocturnal time via a murmuring appendix of essays. Turning the term ‘anthropocene’ over a colloquial riverbed of intimations—retuning its resonances and compulsions to a lexicon of existence and survival—Sledmere invites us to consider our response (and our ongoing being) amidst an ever-widening gulf of social and environmental crises. To examine the song as sung, to refract the act of singing, here we’ve a citational web of resilient ideas. A book that examines the startled creativity of our present, the immersion of our moment, and the muddiness of our outlook: ever on the make and wide-awake for new forms of (and forums for) active engagement.  

Sledmere’s Song begins with a suite of verses for June 21st, 2021—a searching, lyric architecture for the Summer Solstice—a paean to the possibility of meadowing a dreamscape on the horizontal brink of our warmest season. This poetry then hyperlinks its way away from the conclusive camber of the broken line to pose a reticulated, exploratory conception of our reading and writing the transitive labour of the daily: a mode of critical positioning and being that Sledmere terms hypercritique.

Spilling outward from this single poem, through an array of elaborative footnotes we’ve a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ guidebook to our epochal moment of convergent calamities. Slumbering, spectral units, subjectivity, syncope, and survival. Under the filial wing of Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Sledmere deconstructs instrumental, solutionist thought modes across theory, culture and society. Her trace materials are glitter and dust, cinders and syllables; this is a book that rubs sand together to make glass of its sentences and considers the fragility of a window’s slant and angle on the seasonal arc and drift of perspectival time.  

A book on the need for song as midsummer inches its way toward an axiomatic autumn, Sledmere’s work scrutinises contemporary modes of critical inquiry: of the writing for, the arguing towards, and the reading backwards to contemplate, instead, the shimmer time of the present tense.



For the attention of ‘brick & mortar’ bookshops,
preorder copies of Sledmere’s Song via our
distributor, Asterism Books.




Events
& Readings
& Happenings


                   
28.11.24

            St. Mungo’s Mirrorball Showcase
            with Oksana Maksymchuk, Maria Sledmere,
            Em Strang, Tim Tim Cheng & Hamish Whyte.
            Glasgow CCA
            See here.

09.11.24                       

_{Sledmere, Herd, & Farrier at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.}



22.10.24                    

                                        
 

_{Sledmere & Macartney at Hopscotch / Fixotek, Berlin.}

Maria Sledmere is a theorist, a symptomologist, a lyrical poet. She gives us songs for the Anthropocene, oneiric deviations, new routes through the ecodreamscapes of twenty-first century life, the ‘era of high capitalism,' as Walter Benjamin put it, writing about Charles Baudelaire, about a hundred years ago. I love this book, its ‘lyrical architecture’ a house of cathexis, a place where poems, concepts, places and thinkers rub each against other: Lana Del Rey, deep time, strawberry moons, digital snow, the long light of a midsummer solstice, Hélène Cixous, Tom Cohen, Timothy Morton, Kathryn Yusoff, Glasgow, Fred Moten, Bernadette Mayer, and so on, and so on. So many fellow travellers for our endings. In its sentences, across its chapters, Midsummer Song performs an eros for something other. Hypercritique. Gestic lyricism for a future that ‘should have been here sooner.’

Carl Lavery

Maria Sledmere has given us a beautiful waking dream with Midsummer Song—one that proliferates new possibilities for perception, relation, replenishment, and pleasure in a time that often feels impossible. This book is a portal; do come through.

Nicole Seymour


_{Sledmere, photographed by Kenni Li, © 2024}


Praise for Sledmere’s first collection,
The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021)


How do you explain yourself to yourself when you suspect that actuality—your experience of it—is provisional and full of error? You come up with your own poetics, your own tense and mode of address, which is a lunar one, and which involves speaking in crushed, frothy mouthfuls to a terrifyingly silent, unpredictable and generous friend (celestial objects, an indifferent lover, &c.). 

The Luna Erratum offers no truth except in things—colours, materials, beings, dreams, schemes of language, human artefacts and locations—and their known convergences, all of which hold as much affective weight and capacity for transformation as the events that precipitated this profoundly graceful, unsettling and mesmerising book.

Sophie Collins

A glittering universe, Maria Sledmere’s first poetry collection is both lyrical and electric, both video game and watercolour. Reading these poems feels like ingesting semantic MDMA, the ectoplasm of a Victorian ghost trying to reach her lover through an unstable Wi-Fi connection. Sledmere’s words ooze a desire that is part animal, part human, part astral body.  

Nadia de Vries

Maria Sledmere is an artist, editor, educator and writer based in Glasgow. She is the author of over twenty creative publications, including Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024), An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023), Cocoa & Nothing (with Colin Herd, SPAM Press, 2023), Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022) and The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021). With Rhian Williams, she co-edited the anthology the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020). Sledmere lectures in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, is managing editor of SPAM Press and teaches writing workshops for Beyond Form and the87press.


Sledmere’s work was selected
via open submission by the NoUP
editors, MMXXIII