(ANNOUNCEMENT) New pamphlet! Sick Story: a remix by Maria Hardin

We've been simmering away on something beautiful over summer. A new pamphlet! This is a very special publication from Maria Hardin (the eagle-eyed will find her poems in previous issues of SPAM Magazine), forthcoming in November 2025.

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.

A word from our editor-in-chief, Kirsty Dunlop:

As long term fans of Maria’s writing, it was a joy when Sick Story came our way. Here is a hybrid carrier bag of prose poetics, dancing with shape shifting selves navigating sick time in our accelerated everyday. A post-internet remix, a whirlwind of Marias, here is the tender sized book you will want to carry around and read in one go on the bus and remix again and again.

++Read Maria Sledmere's extended review of Hardin's previous pamphlet, Weep Hole, here. 🌹🩹

About the author

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.

Praise for Sick Story

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)

PREORDER the book for just £6 from our webstore here.

PRESS: If you would like a review copy, please email spamzine.editors@gmail.com.

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Launch details

We are launching Sick Story in person at MF Books, Glasgow on 1st November 2025, 7pm (arrive promptly). Maria will be joined by special guest readers.

This event is free but ticketed. You can get a ticket and preorder the book here.

Accessibility: Mount Florida Books is wheelchair accessible. Unfortunately our toilet is not. If you have any access requirements, please email info@mountfloridabooks.com and we will do our best to meet them.

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Published: 20/10/25