Books by Maria Sledmere

infra·structure is a collaborative work shaped over a year of correspondence between Katy Lewis Hood and Maria Sledmere. The pamphlet was written following an Association of Literature and Environment conference on the Orkney islands, a wind battered archipelago north of the Scottish mainland. The poems respond to this distinct setting and share a dichotomous relationship where each ‘complete’ poem is mirrored by an ‘incomplete’ sister poem. Katy Lewis Hood and Maria Sledmere’s innovative dismantling of language echoes the destructive energy of the natural world. infra·structure is a highly original, must read pamphlet.

nature sounds without nature sounds aims for a pure expenditure of the energy economies of the anthropocene, latching onto shimmering instants of anxiety and happiness among crisis, precarity and ending worlds. Influenced by the likes of Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector, Lisa Robertson, Ariana Reines, Lana Del Rey and the new materialist turn in IDM, it chews the rare candies of late capitalism in the hope of a levelling up or survival. Poetry as cheat code, dreamscape; the lyric as sultry song of aporia and longing. nature sounds reflects the ambient poetics of a fractured present, its sonic palettes and ekphrastic realities erected as desire's latent architecture in the contexts of liminal labour, cherry-flavoured melancholy and the ontological upheavals of ecological emergency. Situated in the microstructures and object universe of everyday life, it nevertheless bears cosmic ambitions: exploring what we ask of meaning and mood, music and image in a time where our every horizon or hermeneutics glitches.