Peter Barlow’s Cigarette at the Carlton Club

Two months is a long time in literature, but finally our favourite “afternoon of alternative poetries” is rolling around again – and there’s a real treat in store in the last event before the festive season (and a good excuse to free yourself up from the burdens of Saturday afternoon otherwise, we presume, spent traipsing around the shops in a panic-flap that it’s now officially the month before Christmas). For Peter Barlow’s Cigarette #46, the organising team – Tim Allen, Joey Frances and Rachel Sills – have invited Maria Sledmere, Harriet Tarlo and Lucy Wilkinson along to read.

Down from Glasgow, Maria Sledmere is a writer, artist, editor, educator and prolific avant-gardeiste, whose name is murmured alongside those of Lyn Hejinian and Bernadette Mayer. She is lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, director of SPAM Press and the author of over 20 creative publications, including Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024), An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023), Cocoa & Nothing (with Colin Herd, SPAM Press, 2023), Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022) and The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021). Published on 30 September, her most recent book, Midsummer Song / Hypercritique, is the second title in Tenement’s ‘No University Press’ series and was described by Gilles Deleuze expert Claire Colebrook as “a lyrical, intense and lamentful dream for an increasingly fragile future”. ‘Hypercritique’ is a term coined by Sledmere for a mode of critical positioning and being that responds to the anthropocene through entanglements of poetry, essay and journaling.

Crossing the hills is Harriet Tarlo, a poet and academic at Sheffield Hallam University, where she has convened the acclaimed Creative Writing Masterclass series since 2015, inviting writers and professionals from the writing world to contribute to teaching and give stimulating and informative talks and readings. Her books include Gathering Grounds (Shearsman, 2019) and Field (Shearsman, 2016), as well as four artists books with Judith Tucker (Wild Pansy Press). She was also the editor of the influential anthology of radical landscape poetry The Ground Aslant (Shearsman, 2011). Her recent collections are 2021’s Cut Flowers, illustrated by artist Chloe Bonfield and published by Guillemot Press, as well as the brand-new Cut Flowers II – this reading is partly in honour of this much-anticipated work. Some years ago Harriet Tarlo found an “elusive, alluring little form” and started writing the Cut Flowers series, reflecting engagement with place, environment, art, music and death. All kinds of materials found a place to go that might allow, to some extent, for the contradictory nature of life and language, their depth and shallowness. 

Writer, bookbinder and specialist dyslexia English teacher Lucy Wilkinson runs Manchester-based small publishing press death of workers whilst building skyscrapers, which has recently produced books by Kate Feld and Lydia Unsworth. Shas just completed her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow, and this is a rare chance to hear Lucy reading her own work, which includes her forthcoming book The Alluscape (2025). Previous publications include blues not worth bad skin (2018), Civil War: So Far-It-Happened (2020), Past Echoes Squark (2020), Stuck Shadows In The Shapes That We Create (2021) and The Sandstainers (2023). Her work is also featured in journals such as Periodicals (2022), Resonance Anthology (2022) and Fragile (Earth Bound Press).