(Praise for Sledmere’s
Song.)
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
Brick & mortar bookshops /
order via asterism.
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
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.