140 x 212mm, 469 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024

Maria Sledmere’s Midsummer Song—an autopoietic almanack of disambiguated ideas, a pale fire of a poem—is a spiralling work of scholarship that, oriented around the axis of this single ‘song,’ argues a curling grammatology of nocturnal time via a murmuring appendix of essays. Turning the term ‘anthropocene’ over a colloquial riverbed of intimations—retuning its resonances and compulsions to a lexicon of existence and survival—Sledmere invites us to consider our response (and our ongoing being) amidst an ever-widening gulf of social and environmental crises. To examine the song as sung, to refract the act of singing, here we’ve a citational web of resilient ideas. A book that examines the startled creativity of our present, the immersion of our moment, and the muddiness of our outlook: ever on the make and wide-awake for new forms of (and forums for) active engagement.  

Sledmere’s Song begins with a suite of verses for June 21st, 2021—a searching, lyric architecture for the Summer Solstice—a paean to the possibility of meadowing a dreamscape on the horizontal brink of our warmest season. This poetry then hyperlinks its way away from the conclusive camber of the broken line to pose a reticulated, exploratory conception of our reading and writing the transitive labour of the daily: a mode of critical positioning and being that Sledmere terms hypercritique.

Spilling outward from this single poem, through an array of elaborative footnotes we’ve a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ guidebook to our epochal moment of convergent calamities. Slumbering, spectral units, subjectivity, syncope, and survival. Under the filial wing of Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Sledmere deconstructs instrumental, solutionist thought modes across theory, culture and society. Her trace materials are glitter and dust, cinders and syllables; this is a book that rubs sand together to make glass of its sentences and considers the fragility of a window’s slant and angle on the seasonal arc and drift of perspectival time.  

A book on the need for song as midsummer inches its way toward an axiomatic autumn, Sledmere’s work scrutinises contemporary modes of critical inquiry: of the writing for, the arguing towards, and the reading backwards to contemplate, instead, the shimmer time of the present tense.

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