Woundscape: Maria Sledmere

Woundscape is a creative response to Making Imagined Objects, the 2^nd International Alasdair Gray Conference which happened in Glasgow, June 2022, commissioned by The Alasdair Gray Archive in partnership with Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. This pamphlet has been produced with support from the Scottish Poetry Library’s ‘Poetry Pamphlet Fund’.

“An introspective set of poetics that sews together the gathering discomfort of the human soul and stretches it out across the urban decay of our crumbling cities. Sledmere is an architect of the atmospheric, the surreal, but captures with a brilliant and delicate undercurrent that singularity of emotion that we can all relate to; the absurdity of our existence. This book is inimitable, a triumph of melancholy raining down upon our weathered streets, where hearts are imprisoned, and all doors are carefully barred.” (Stuart McPherson)

“Where does poetry go when ‘tomorrow becomes sorer and sorer’? I’d follow it here, to Maria Sledmere’s writing. These brilliant poems encounter familiar woundscapes, from Alasdair Gray on the heart, to the scaffolding and sanctuaries of a city, our civic agonies, and remake the stakes of poetry again. As they meet the ache of bodily enclosures and language, something emerges, like a condition: shared, real and moving, alive. A kind of love poetry perhaps, that knows in its lightness the costs. Fake, hungry and true. ‘To eat/like to read a poem’. Nothing more urgent and fresh than this, ‘going home in the prosody of being sold nothing’. Eat now, before it’s gone.” (Carol Watts)

“A work which is at once meaningfully drawn from Gray’s own Woundscape and very much her own, this response is full of all the vividity, sparky connectivity and sensitivity you’d expect from Maria Sledmere. Never a dull phrase, never a dead word, her Woundscape – ‘disciplined/in the disappearing city/of civic agonies’ – is urgent and arresting.” (Rodge Glass)

“What Maria Sledmere deftly does is extend her prose beyond Gray and the ‘Making Imagined Objects’ event, weaving into it personal interactions, responses to other creatives work (including Louise Bourgeois), digital wanderings and liminal spaces. The result is a layered dreamscape written with a human heart but embodying otherworldly wisdom.” (Sorcha Dallas, Custodian, The Alasdair Gray Archive) 

Released 4th November 2023
Edition of 100 numbered copies. *
ISBN: 978-1-3999-7021-1

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Maria Sledmere is from Ayrshire, Scotland. She is the author of several books including Cocoa and Nothing with Colin Herd (SPAM Press, 2023), Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022) and An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023). They are Managing Editor of SPAM Press and Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, while also teaching community writing workshops with the87press and Beyond Form. Maria was recently included in the Saltire Society’s ‘40 under 40’  list celebrating outstanding Scottish creatives, and their next poetry collection, Cinders, is forthcoming from Krupskaya Books in 2024.

 

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