Cinders

Maria Sledmere

Cinders, Maria Sledmere's U.S. debut, retells an old tale about lateness-how late is it, is it too late, what are the stakes of being too late if it is too late. This lateness, in Sledmere's visionary lyric poems, pervades the structures and strictures of the pop dystopias and erotic utopias she studies: gender, class, geography, space-inner and outer. The very elements of Cinderella that were there all along as the wood burned to ash in the hearth.