SPAM Press are launching a new pamphlet, Sick Story: a remix, by the Swedish-American poet Maria Hardin.

If linear healing narratives are meaningless in the face of chronic illness, then what is the shape of a sick story? To explore this question, Maria Hardin borrows from Bernadette Mayer’s Story (1968) and Ursula Le Guin's carrier bag theory of fiction, which posits that the shape of a narrative is not an arrow, or the masculine climax, but a bag. Mayer tossed all that she was interested into the bag of her story and then gave it form. In this book is Hardin's bag—her sick remix.

Maria Hardin is a Swedish-American artist and bilingual poet based in Stockholm. She is the author of Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (Action Books) and several chapbooks.

Maria will be joined by readings from Jane Hartshorn and Kate Paul.

Praise for the book:

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, Interrogating the Eye (Schism Neuronics, 2022)

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, The Jacques Lacan Foundation (MOIST, 2022)

Event is free but ticketed via the bookshop. You can also preorder a copy of the book when you order your ticket.

The event will feature readings from Jane Hartshorn, Kate Paul and Maria Hardin.
Pamphlets will be for sale!
About the readers ✨
Jane Hartshorn is a poet and PhD candidate at the University of Kent, writing about the lived experience of chronic illness. Her pamphlets include Blowfly (ossa prints, 2023), In the Sick Hour (Takeaway Press, 2020) and Tract (Litmus Publishing, 2017).​ She has had poems published by Boudicca Press, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Lucy Writers and SPAM. Her website is janehartshorn.weebly.com
Kate Paul is an artist based in Glasgow. She makes recordings, poetry, events, performances, and installations.
Maria Hardin is a Swedish-American artist and bilingual poet based in Stockholm. She is the author of Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (Action Books) and several chapbooks.