INTRODUCING THE FIRST IN OUR POET’S PROSE SEQUENCE
We are delighted to welcome two extremely exciting poets to Housmans for the first installment of our Summer Poetry Series. This season we’re going to be doing something a bit different and focusing instead on the work that poets produce outside of ‘traditional’ lyric modes; focusing instead on prose; novels; novellas; novelettes; essays; criticism; chunks of memoir and ‘hybrid’ lumps.
Opening the series we have two poets whose work (and dual radiant vibe) need very little introduction (to those who’ve been following literary avant-gardes in Britain for the last decade or so): Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere. Between them they compose the centripetal force of Glasgow’s celebrated post-internet DIY publishing project SPAM and have produced a truly terrifying volume of exceedingly brilliant poetry collections, scholarly work and experiments.
At Housmans they will be discussing their recent experiments in fiction writing: Kirsty’s Centrefolding and Maria’s The Indigo Hours.
Centrefolding follows an unnamed protagonist who shifts, sprints, swerves and transmorphs through the “Centre!” (exclamation mark required), a research institute in some northern British city, in our current jittery moment. Glitches in reality abound: expect research into alien life that goes nowhere, an underground hospital, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and ‘lingerers’ slithering under glass doors (you know, like a worm). Daisy Lafarge says it is her ‘dream novelette: gossipy, pacy, and full of gorgeous swerves of language. With enviable wit and inventiveness’.
The Indigo Hours is an immersive, radiant text that moves between autofiction, essay, and poetic prose to document the textures of contemporary longing. Centred around a seasonal arc and filtered through the ambient melancholia of late capitalism, the work refracts emotional experience through media, memory, pop culture, and shifting landscapes—from Berlin pools to prairie towns, from night buses to art galleries. Sledmere’s sentences are lush, recursive, and sensorily attuned, sustaining a rhythmic, diaristic lyricism that continually folds the personal into the atmospheric. What emerges is a powerful reckoning with intimacy, grief, and temporality at the edges of digital and embodied life. ‘Maria Sledmere tells a post-Romantic tale of moonlit precarity and passion among pools & thunderstorms & prairies & airports…’ says Poppy Cockburn.
Both poets will read from their work, discuss shared ideas, themes, feelings and forms. As always with our poetry series, we encourage you to byob and the spirit of celebration and conversation. If we have time we might engage in a more general conversation on the nature of poetry, prose and other aesthetic modes gurgling up thru this current zombied epoch of slow collapse and cultural amnesia. (‘Why do all the poets write novels now, anyway??’ we might ask.)
This is a free event, but we have limited capacity so please do book ahead using the link below.
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