As Hardin moves through the ongoing ebb and flow of chronic illness, she shapes bodily failures and the molding of time through textual explorations. Her writing takes form across various media, including installations, sound sculptures, and site-specific works, delving into themes of isolation, healing, and a dissolving sense of self. By bending the potential of language to its limits, she invites a close encounter with the audience in which timelessness, nothingness and the detangling of the body are felt rather than understood.
— Isa Van den Wouwer, curator & writer
Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether, the hallucinatory debut by artist-poet Maria Hardin, teems with sonic roses and orchid-birthing bodies. A member of Hekseskolen, Hardin draws on the twin fascinations of magic and visual art to craft sick sonnets as powerful as spells. Infected, inflamed, and gorging on language, this Anthropo-scenic collection manages to be both Baroque and utterly contemporary, ornate and slangy, a clutch of contagious eco-shockers guaranteed to make you weep.
– Action Books
— Isa Van den Wouwer, curator & writer
Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether, the hallucinatory debut by artist-poet Maria Hardin, teems with sonic roses and orchid-birthing bodies. A member of Hekseskolen, Hardin draws on the twin fascinations of magic and visual art to craft sick sonnets as powerful as spells. Infected, inflamed, and gorging on language, this Anthropo-scenic collection manages to be both Baroque and utterly contemporary, ornate and slangy, a clutch of contagious eco-shockers guaranteed to make you weep.
– Action Books
Sublimely minimal and ecological like a womb’s pulse, Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether is sensually fecundating. Maria Hardin’s work is fresh, rich with verve, vim, and tautological and alliterated playfulness.
— Vi Khi Nao, author of War Is Not My Mother
Maria Hardin writes sonnets with open, weeping wounds in them: aching sonnets that swallow the world; sick sonnets; sonnets with a dreamlife of their own, sexily inflected with melancholy vernaculars of the internet’s lyric detritus.
Poetry’s aeolian forms curl into Maria Hardin’s iconically laconic voice, which makes of words a spell’s worth of elements and materials: vapour, mineral, lollipop, flower, foam and prayer.
— Maria Sledmere, author of Cinders
Down with the sickness of another deathly smog? Each poem will Insta-filter your body; infect you; "Leeloo" you!
— R/ADIO/ACTIVE C-LOU_D