The Luna Erratum

How do you explain yourself to yourself when you suspect that actuality – your experience of it – is provisional and full of error? You come up with your own poetics, your own tense and mode of address, which is a lunar one, and which involves speaking in crushed, frothy mouthfuls to a terrifyingly silent, unpredictable and generous friend (celestial objects, an indifferent lover, &c). The Luna Erratum offers no truth except in things – colours, materials, beings, dreams, schemes of language, human artefacts and locations – and their known convergences, all of which hold as much affective weight and capacity for transformation as the events that precipitated this profoundly graceful, unsettling and mesmerising book.

Maria Sledmere is an artist, occasional music journalist and poet based in Glasgow. She is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press and member of A+E Collective. Her pamphlets include nature sounds without nature sounds (Sad Press, 2019), Rainbow Arcadia (Face Press, 2019), infra•structure – with Katy Lewis Hood (Broken Sleep Books, 2020), Chlorophyllia (OrangeApple Press, 2020), neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press, 2020) and, with Mau Baiocco and Kyle Lovell, Sonnets for Hooch (Fathomsun, Mermaid Motel and Rat Press 2021). With Rhian Williams she co-edited the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020) and her poems were included in Makar/Unmakar (Tapsalteerie, 2019), an anthology of contemporary poets in Scotland, edited by Calum Rodger. Her poem 'Ariosos for Lavish Matter' was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prize, and an epistolary work with Katy Lewis Hood, Tangents, was longlisted for the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize. A collaborative exhibition, The Palace of Humming Trees (2021), was recently presented at Glasgow’s French Street Gallery, with artist Jack O’Flynn and curator Katie O’Grady. The Luna Erratum is her first collection.