A poetry and music night with performances by Caleb Nichols, Francis Lung, Colin Herd, Maria Sledmere, and Sam Rodilosso.

Sound Image is a new, irregularly held poetry series in Glasgow, featuring poetry, music, and sound experiments.

Book launch

Celebrate the launch of Caleb Nichols’ new collection, Lithic: A Hyperballad, with performances by Caleb Nichols, Francis Lung, Colin Herd, Maria Sledmere and Sam Rodilosso. Tickets support the venue hire; no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

~

Caleb Nichols is the first queer poet laureate of San Luis Obispo County California. Their poems have appeared in the New England Review, Poetry Wales, and many other places on both sides of the Atlantic. Caleb is the author of Lithic: A Hyperballad, winner of the 2024 Harbor Editions Laureate Prize and the editor of You & i Are Earth: Poems of the Queer Pastoral, published by 14 Poems (forthcoming in 2027). Caleb holds a PhD from Bangor University in North Wales and lives in Glasgow. More at https://calebnicholis.gay.

Lithic: A Hyperballad (2026, Harbor Editions Laureate Prize Winner) brings together a sequence of poems and a lyric essay that traverses memory, gender, landscape, and language—excavating a self shaped by place, queerness, ecological disquiet, and artistic lineage. As a work of queer ecopoetics rooted in both lyric and experimental inquiry, Lithic interrogates language, and nature, and digs deep to excavate meaning. The result echoes what Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’ a concept rooted in the singer Björk’s 1990’s smash hit ‘Hyperballad’: an object, like a relationship, so large that it is perhaps impossible to really comprehend via the standard set of human senses.

The collection was born on the liminal shores of North Wales and the Central Coast of California—two marginal landscapes threaded through by rivers both visible and buried. Throughout the manuscript, Cymraeg (Welsh) language and etymology resonate against Californian punk, eco-trauma, and the plastic shimmer of contemporary collapse. The collection seems to ask: what if the poem is not the artifact but the excavation itself? That is to say, what if the ‘I’ of the poem is actually a process, and not a subjectivity?

Alongside the book, Nichols is releasing a spoken word collection called Stone Age Is Now: Poems From Lithic, on US label Royal Oakie. Across twelve tracks Nichols interpolates poems from Lithic: A Hyperballad with tracks from Stone Age Is Back, bringing new depth to his indie-rock and alt-folk compositions. A meditation on grief, but not in the ways you’d expect, the album explores what it means to be living and dying right now, in this moment of extraordinary change. With a robust history of live musical performances spanning album releases in the 2020’s with iconic US label Kill Rock Stars, and back to the 00’s when Nichols was a member of celebrated neo-folk band Port O’Brien, this fusion of poetry and music feels like a natural culmination of Nichols creative output.

Francis lung is the pseudonym of Manchester-based musician Tom McClung. After releasing the BBC 6 music lauded ‘Miracle’ on Memphis industries, Lung moved further leftfield with the ‘Short Stories’ EP, a collection of half-spoken, half-sung compositions which connected various plot lines and characters through a six song suite. Most recently, Lung rejoined his cult 2010’s band WU LYF and co-produced their latest album ‘A Wave That Will Never Break’ which was released to critical acclaim in 2026.

Colin Herd was born in Stirling and lives in Glasgow, where he works as a poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. Published works include too ok (BlazeVOX, 2011), Glovebox (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2014), Oberwildling (2015), a collaboration with SJ Fowler based on the life and work of German Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, Click & Collect (Boiler House Press, 2017), Swamp Kiss (Red Ceilings Press, 2018) and You Name It (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019) The poem ‘rug design’ from Glovebox was highly commended in the Forward Prize.

Colin Herd’s frequent collaborations, with artists and poets alike, include artists’ books such as Blots, with Susan Wilson, and Open Wound with Cat Outram. He has also collaborated with many writers on a series of poetry performances as part of SJ Fowler’s The Enemies Project. Colin has published reviews and articles on art and literature in publications including Aesthetica Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, PN Review and The Independent.

Maria Sledmere was born in Hemel Hempstead, raised in South Ayrshire and now lives in Glasgow. In 2022 she completed a DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, working on a project of ‘hypercritique’ which responds to the anthropocene through entanglements of poetry, essay and journaling. Currently she is a tutor and mentor for Beyond Form Creative Writing (https://www.beyondformcreativewriting.com/), and teaches at the University of Glasgow. She is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press (ht

Description supplied by the event organiser.