“This is the second collection of a poet committed to charting the queasy strangeness of contemporary living. Sledmere’s writing compellingly explores disordered eating and dysmorphia, as well as the struggles of capitalism and of forging community, but its major focus is our existence within the Anthropocene – the complicated experience of intimacy with a damaged and suffering nonhuman world. The poems use ingeniously experimental, innovative poetic language to bring this painful intimacy alive: “I stick out my / tongue/ for the rain, I know it is made of crackle gel, glass beads of it / full of tiny histories, artificial, imitating rain.” But despite the ecological melancholia that runs throughout, Sledmere also makes room for a joyful love of the nonhuman, even among the ruins: “My true love / is a billion luna moth dollars / a rusty door of a building / all the possible rot in the universe / through the eyes of a newt.” An ambitious, darkly funny and politically radical collection for our moment of crisis and collapse.”
Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian

Visions & Feed is a collection that spans over two years of work brought together under the mirror phase of an anthropocene lyric filtered through crises of femininity, disordered eating, dysmorphia, labour and loss.

Sledmere asks: what does it mean to be a body in one of many dying worlds, what forms of work are done to endure it, what desires and pleasures are still possible and which are breaking down? Adopting playful and associative registers of ascent, while exploring devotion, metabolism, magic, domesticity and the ambience of dream forms, this is an intimate poetics of song and hormone, isolation and longing, fashion and pop, colour and vision in the saturated live feed of post-internet lyric. Amidst the reverb of climate melancholia and oestrogen blues, the speakers of Visions & Feed morph between depth and surface, film and music, myth and play to weather the days. Between epistolary, elegiac, confessional, ekphrastic, prose-poetic, processual, discursive and long-form cascades, the book offers iterative, experimental and fractal modes for exploring ecological entanglement within daily life.

Maria Sledmere is an artist, poet and lecturer based in Glasgow. She is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press, a member of A+E Collective and tutor at Beyond Form Creative Writing. Her books include The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021) and String Feeling (Erotoplasty Editions, 2022), alongside pamphlets such as nature sounds without nature sounds (Sad Press), Rainbow Arcadia (Face Press), infra•structure – with Katy Lewis Hood (Broken Sleep), Chlorophyllia (OrangeApple Press), neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press) and Sans Soleil — with fred spoliar (Mermaid Motel/Earthbound Press, 2022). In 2020 she co-edited an anthology, the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene, with Rhian Williams. Her work has been highly commended in the Forward Prize, and long-listed for the Ivan Juritz Visual Arts Prize. In 2021, The Palace of Humming Trees, an exhibition with Katie O’Grady and Jack O’Flynn, was shown at French Street Studios. Other collaborators include the musicians Zoee, Lanark Artefax, Scott Crawford Morrison (Neuro Trash), Kirsty Dunlop and North Sea Dialect. She was a recent writer in residence at The Grammarsow in West Cornwall. Find her at mariasledmere.com.