Join us for a celebration of Midsummer Song (Hypercritique), a book by Maria Sledmere recently released through NoUP, an imprint of Tenement Press. Described by the publisher as ‘an autopoietic almanack of disambiguated ideas, a pale fire of a poem’ and ‘a spiralling work of scholarship’, this ambitious creative-critical work will be launched in conversation with David Farrier (Professor of Literature and the Environment) and Colin Herd (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing). Expect a mix of reading, discussion and audience Q&A.

The book is developed out of Sledmere’s work as a DFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, and was selected via open submission. Moving fluidly between lineated verse and essaying, Midsummer Song positions itself as a choose-your-own-adventure style guidebook for living in and against the anthropocene. Attending to climate emergency, the global pandemic and accelerations in technology, its lyrical ‘I’ feels through these issues as they reach every enclave of daily life, often threatening thought itself. This is a book ‘on the need for song as midsummer inches its way toward an axiomatic autumn’.