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.“Maria Sledmere sneaks up on you. In language that is deceptively intimate and often playful she limns a world of dark, sharp corners, where ecological catastrophe no longer looms but makes itself felt in every aspect of daily life. Intricate and expansive, never alighting on the expected, the poems in CINDERS are both gems and bombs. A subtle stunner of a book.”— Anahid Nersessian