Poetry pamphlet launch with Tom Bailey and Maria Sledmere

Join us to launch Tom Bailey's debut pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, with readings from Tom and Glasgow-based poet Maria Sledmere.

"Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses is a pamphlet I’ve been waiting for. It did not disappoint. Bailey makes the ordinary spectacular. The worlds he spins in his poems are full of dreamlike lines and thinking, startling images. He tilts the world to allow us to see it differently and evokes the baffling, beautiful experience of living, grieving, loving, existing." – Cecilia Knapp

In this poignant and adventurous pamphlet, Tom Bailey captures the joy of connection, the omnipresence of grief, and the quiet fortitude of those navigating both. Portents come in many forms: horses, leaves, paper boats, ‘a magpie rattl[ing] the rainstick of its throat’. But so does hope: in fancy dress parties, in ‘the / song the conch sings’, in the way ‘the river threads / its noisy voice through the needle of itself’. With dry wit and piercing clarity, Bailey interweaves humour and pathos to craft poems that linger in the mind and reveal a captivating new voice.

About our speakers:

Tom Bailey is a poet based in Edinburgh. He won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize 2023, and his poems have been published in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The North, berlin lit, bath magg and elsewhere. He also edits the online poetry magazine And Other Poems.

Maria Sledmere is a Glasgow-based poet from South Ayrshire. Spanning creative, critical and visual practice, her work explores environmental degradation, sleep deprivation, dreams and the digital age. She is lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde and her latest book, an experimental monograph titled Midsummer Song (Hypercritique), was published by No University Press in 2024. Other publications include Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024), Woundscape (Osmosis Press, 2023), An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023), Cocoa and Nothing – with Colin Herd (SPAM Press, 2023), Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022) and The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021). In 2023, Maria was included in the Saltire Society’s ‘40 under 40’ list celebrating ‘outstanding Scottish creatives’ and her work has been profiled on BBC Radio and in The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Dazed, It’s Nice That and other places. Maria is also director of SPAM Press and founding editor of Gilded Dirt zine. Her next book is a collection of Celtic sci-fi poems co-written with Ian Macartney, forthcoming with Tapsalteerie in spring 2025.