Maximum Summer

Sylee Gore

Outside a bureaucratic office, a photographer holds a newborn, haunted by what floats beyond the frame. Honest, calm, and full of ideas, Maximum Summer moves along Berlin’s courtyards and museums but is rooted in the light of attention. This formally innovative cycle of spliced sestinas in prose won the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Maximum Summer is Sylee Gore’s debut poetry chapbook. Gore’s sculptural poetry has been exhibited in Cambridge and Brussels and her translations from German are published widely. She enjoys interdisciplinary collaboration.

'The chief risk in Sylee Gore’s work is silence: how much can you not say and still say everything? Her poems are so delicately made, and yet so densely lived. I felt like I was holding my breath through this whole sequence, and when I released it—when the language released me—the air of existence seemed clearer, truer, more transparently itself.' – Christian Wiman

'So much ordinary light slips through these poems. New life becomes composed, subtly, under the context of ongoing diasporic dispossession: ‘Dryden says a translation should resemble the original. I take a photograph of you.'—a juxtaposition which makes intimate the mimetic limits of capturing our loved ones.' – Tawanda Mulalu