Sick Story asks what happens when one's illness refuses resolution. Inspired by Bernadette Mayer’s Story and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Maria Hardin reimagines the illness narrative in the form of a collage. Comprised of cinematic vignettes, pithy one-liners, current reading, Victorian poets, and much, much more, this is a sad, sweet, funny book that manages to do a huge amount in 48 short pages. Salve!
– Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation & The Ultraviolet Catastrophe
Hardin creates a privileged altar to an uncooperative, mortal body—piled with infusion tubing, medical charts, and a creeping sense of dread. Sick Story: A Remix explores the psychic hurt that chronic illness festers, leaking lurid, anguished pus as vile as any infected wound. Both prosaic and baroque, Hardin's aesthetic extremes mutate into a new breed of leukocyte: cloying, omnivorous, deathly. I’m shook, shivering, ready to burn all my art alongside a squadron of Marias.
– M. Forajter, authoer of Interrogating the Eye
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
– Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation & The Ultraviolet Catastrophe
Hardin creates a privileged altar to an uncooperative, mortal body—piled with infusion tubing, medical charts, and a creeping sense of dread. Sick Story: A Remix explores the psychic hurt that chronic illness festers, leaking lurid, anguished pus as vile as any infected wound. Both prosaic and baroque, Hardin's aesthetic extremes mutate into a new breed of leukocyte: cloying, omnivorous, deathly. I’m shook, shivering, ready to burn all my art alongside a squadron of Marias.
– M. Forajter, authoer of Interrogating the Eye
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