Neutral Milky Halo

neutral milky halo loops around the pixelated tempos, imaginaries and myths of this fraught, contingent moment. Poems of weird ecology, cultivated address and tendering detail; poems of disorientation, hospitality, sounding and shimmer. Poems seen through screens, reflected on or refracted from glass; poems seen-through and poems making visible the otherwise shadowed. Poems that envelop the animal, the flower, the technologies of writing and other means of resistance, expression and growth. Weaving the everyday ‘scenes’ of the anthropocene — from starry cosmologies of new gods, months and seasons, to kissable forests and the ice cream trucks that haunt our quarantine — neutral milky halo draws fragile yet glistening socialities for dreaming between ‘thick’ futures.

Maria Sledmere is a writer and artist finishing a DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press, a member of A+E Collective, editor at Dostoyevsky Wannabe and occasional music journalist. She co-hosts a podcast, URL Sonata, and workshop series, Pop Matters. Recent publications include nature sounds without nature sounds (Sad Press), Rainbow Arcadia (Face Press), infra•structure – with Katy Lewis Hood (Broken Sleep), and Chlorophyllia (OrangeApple Press). With Rhian Williams, she co-edited the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Her poem 'Ariosos for Lavish Matter' was highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prize, and her work was included in makar / unmakar (Tapsalteerie, 2019), an anthology of contemporary poets in Scotland.