big words
small words
“This is gorgeous poetry. Not an adjective I would normally deploy in any critique. But there is nothing ‘normal’ about Macartney’s collection. It performs the remarkable feat of yoking an absolutely contemporary sensibility, encrusted by the jargon of internet and social media, to a kind of high and flighty rhetoric that gives some of these poems an ecstatic and exhilerating energy. There is also a plainer speech here and some very moving love poetry. In sun-drunk you will find a veritable orchestration of syntax, wise to its virtuoso techniques but unwilling to relinquish and often productive of genuine tenderness. A rare achievement.”
— David Kinloch
“Encompassing hedonism and a deep desire for connection, sun-drunk fizzes with a fierce creativity as well as a sense of humanity and physicality that envelops the reader in its passionate embrace.”
— Ricky Monahan Brown
“sun-drunk is poetry startling in its self-evidence, sun-kisses of sense data in amongst the terrors of the present tense, language-play shot in Sirkian technicolour, a transmission of transitions, an orange-blushed hymnal that ‘captures all the essences of light’, an eddying lightline budding teeming, pure fucking dance.”
— Charlie McIlwain
Batch A (Darksong, Secret Agent Orca 12, God?!) | Stereocat, May 2024
Darksong A kind of spiritual ‘prequel’ to Ian Macartney’s poetry pamphlet sun-drunk, Darksong is for the lunar. Poems of the moon, circling round its glow – moon-ish feelings, too, just without that satellite. To be moon-eyed; to be in love, then not. To whirl in the orbit. Sometimes the poems are funny (often they are not). The oldest is from 2014, but one appeared a decade later.
Secret Agent Orca Twelve “Oh no! Secret Agent Orca 12 has gone rogue and there’s no one left to save the world. Now it’s up to a grieving mother and the Defense Secretary to track him down, and maybe receive some answers along the way – but remember, in the world of poetry and espionage, nothing is as it seems…”
God?! A scrappy zine about dogs.
Shale Bings | Broken Sleep Books, February 2024
The Infinite Fury and other stories | Strange Region, August 2023
Written as prose, speech, thought and game, this collection is a catalogue of post-internet mythmaking, a discourse in Celtic surrealism, gay techno-hauntings, acid-mannerism, and sprawling, spitting hyper-fiction.
“This is such a wildly imaginative book. The Infinite Fury is a collection that charges past the thresholds of love, sex and death with an inspired playfulness. Macartney’s visions of a sharply askance Scotland are rendered in rich snapshots, speculative stories that are digital, satirical, erotic, haunted, tender and irresistibly queer.”
— Jay Gao
“The Infinite Fury by Ian Macartney is both a physically beautiful book and a consistently well-sustained adventure in language and form. The elliptical writing could as easily be classified as poetry as prose. Ultimately, it defied any classifcation.”
— Declan O’Driscoll (Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024 Commendation)
Notes Towards No Subject | Fathomsun, June 2023
— Shaw Worth
“In these varied poems, Ian Macartney convinces us that the best way to confront the ‘staggeringly real’ world – and the claims that it keeps making on our desires – is to embrace its mediation all the way down. And so the ‘I’ lets itself become a monster, the self’s expression anticipates the new language it will get burned into, and ideas are left running in deer-ish things: all in the name of a joy that we can still believe lies open.”
— Jack Belloli
Turtleshell | Saló, January 2023
“‘NO ONE GOES TO INFINITY’ but it might be the best club in the world. Locked into the endless spiritual geometry of the nightclub, Turtleshell is ambitious sonic fiction for ambivalent Scottish futures. In this realm of ‘government-sanctioned’ weather, where chips and cheese are a quantum phenomenon, and queer bodies pulse ecstatically in ‘colourful multitudes’, our narrator is a shimmer quest of ‘arrhythmic’ identities, desires and ‘loosening totalities’. There’s plenty of failure, precarity, confusion and carnal caesura along the way. Macartney took a rave pill, fell through the smirking anthropocene and found the parallel mythoverse somewhere between Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, throbbing with ‘Laser Dolphin ghosts’, nocturnal clamours, salty treasures and elliptical longing.”
— Maria Sledmere
“ Psychedelic, speculative, ultramodern, Turtleshell is the kind of tale that will soak into your bones. Rich with jouissant horror/wonder (wonder-horror), it is yet another sterling work from a rising star.
— Tom Byam Shaw
! / Object | May 2022
— Rishi Dastidar
“Dripping in frantic lexical lushness, occult robotic desiredome, and dutifully desperate hotness... as rousing, raunchy and roistering as any word circus right(eous)ly should be.”
— Michael Pedersen
with IIAA
spontaneous pamphlet | September 2023
with sincere corkscrew
CAPSULE XII | December 2022 [editor]
Dancing About Architecture: Outwith Edition | March 2023 [editor]
An EIBF Special | August 2022
Batch 0 (microAYE, cursed meals, #ScotlandDecides, A Room in London 2) | June 2022
microAYE The aye: six lines of twelve syllables with a ‘quantum jump’ in the middle line, expressed as ‘[…]’. This is the poetic form I invented in lockdown; I kept gravitating towards Union Canal, the site of my daily walk, March 2020 to September 2021. So this is a handful of ayes, wee Scottish affirmations, about a particular personal landscape – West Lothian, Linlithgow, the hometown. Except for the poems that are not – that’s a whole other novel.
cursed meals Here is the ennui of the third lockdown, a limbo: neither the unprecedented tingle of the first, nor the bleak despair of the second, but something more tedious. Capitalism as usual, but masked, and evidently unusual, as usual. The exit rumoured, vaccine a glint in the needle’s eye, but hey, the sun’s shining, the park open to encounters, and the pubs are fully prebooked. You have not moved to London, yet. Also, your family is renovating the house. Pandemic Summer, baby!
#ScotlandDecides As the 2021 Election results limped in through a pandemic’d Scotland, I broadcast the REAL results on Twitter. Such electoral data is now here. But – and can this be believed? - there have been recounts; there have been edits. The answers, fleshed out for clarity. What a time to be alive.
A Room in London 2 A4. Poems from the heartbroken no-popstar adios nervosa; a print sequel to his 2021 EP A Room in London.
World-dreem: an anthology of new(er) writing | May 2021 [co-editor]
This collection brings together bold and esoteric visions from the cutting-edge of Scotland’s young literary scene, and beyond.
This is a transmission from the otherworld. Are you receiving?
Tom Byam Shaw, Rory Mullen, Miriam Schlüter, Ian Macartney, Ask Vestergaard, Mae Diansangu, Kieran Donnan, Seoras Eaglesham, Prema Arasu, Parawat Chang, Mag, Enxhi Mandija, Endija Lukstina, Arthur Allen, Fredrika Siden Cruz, Christopher Kestell, Jordan Stead, Blythe Stockdale, Shaw Worth, Savannah Brown, Murid L. Keshtmand and Orooj e-Zaffar.
Batch O | November 2020 and February 2021)
Drone Re-print of a poem originally published under the name AyeAye12 on DeviantArt in 2014. A traversal through the desert, wherein the blank page is the sand. Words crop up like cacti.
WISP "WIth Sincere sPectres": a mix between pamphlet, zine, newsletter, booklet and blog. Mailed to friends during lockdown. Contained life updates, visuals, media recommendations, an extract from "The Bakery, The Kiln", an "aye", and poem “The Cave Paintings".
Midsummer | July 2019
with Binbag Press
Acceptance – 3 10 | 2019
Earnest Remixes – 3 10 | 2019
124 Questions – King Kion-Fuuz | 2019
3 10 Answers The TLS’ Twenty Questions – 3 10 | 2019
“Two Newer Poems” and Other Twofold Poems – 3 10 | 2019
“Zenethia” and “gertrude, corndog mayor and friends” – @palladium-smoothie | 2019
@thistweetright1 | 2019
httpswwwtheguardiancomukwales – 3 10 | 2018
Now That’s What I Call Poetry 666 – 6 2-9 | 2018
Two New Poems – 3 10 | 2018
Scabs – 3 10 | 2018
Superreferentiality! – 3 10 | 2018
not words
sounds
as FORSYTH
The Fox and The Hiker | 2024
as adios nervosa
ADIOS + NERVOSA | 2023
Lift Mine Eyes Unto The Hills | 2022
Song-poems | 2022
A Room in London | 2021
Irregularity, Catalogue | 2021
Twink-pop | 2021
ARENAS DE PERDICIÓN | 2020
Super Oblique Vinyl Pyramid!!!! | 2020
as Laureate
VAPORWAVE POETRY VOL. 1 | 2020
as He Knows Theory, I Have Machines
Podoloski VST at Night | 2021
as hola nervosa
TWELVE PIANOS | 2024
Un-untitled | 2024
Aye-sides and Commonalities | 2022
an adios nervosa song | 2021
projects
sincere corkscrew | 2021-[...]
Terminal From visionary writer Ricky Monahan Brown comes fourteen tales of 'the end'. From the neo-Gothic to sci-fi, Leith to Brookyn, this is vibrant short fiction which will shock, humour and astound in equal heady measure.
"Terminal lives up to its titular promise of hurtling towards many different senses of ‘end’. Smart, trippy and irreverent, Monahan Brown’s narrative style is just as confident crawling under the bonnet of sci-fi as it is doing Celtic realism, moshing or luring us, fable-like, close to the wood wide web. What use is there for existentialism in an accelerated world of sex dolls, conceptual thanatos and perpetual technical difficulty? Drift on to find out. "
— Maria Sledmere
"Ricky Monahan Brown’s stories evoke the uncanny reality of contemporary life and simultaneously summon the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Poe. Behind his precise prose lurk surprises around every corner, and Monahan Brown walks a fine line between reality and fable in a world that is at once familiar and strange. Spending time with these stories will be richly rewarding.”
— Stephen Sacco
“Ricky Monahan Brown’s language has real pop and fizz. Tense, funny and original: these stories remind us what a good short story is.”
— Cameron Wylie
Ammonia Sunrise From the Danish artist Aske Hyldborg Jensen, Ammonia Sunrise reads like Barthesian dispatches from another dimension. In the form of prose-poems and poem-poems, Jensen details strange turns of the mind, melting into a world weirder than thought with humour, playfulness and grotesquerie.
"Digital and bodily. Ammonia Sunrise is dealing with the endless entanglements of the symbioscene, where trauma and memory become dreams, become frogs, become landscapes become us become pixels. The work is as empathetic as it is distant. As humorous as it is gore-ish. It sticks to your memory like shoe-goo™, with the smell of motor oil and soap and the sound of a frog croak. Entering is not impossible, tech is required. Mould patterns as decorations of our church, sacred paintings for refuge- seeking rodents. Dreams are true down there, undiscovered and hidden."
— Victor Bengtsson
"Ammonia Sunrise uplifts a series of selves without clear boundaries, where the environments of cliffs, frogs, styrofoam, goo, and silverfish swim with human embodiment and wonder... here is hybridity in form mirroring hybridity in the restlessness of our living archive, in all of its plurality and density, constantly rupturing."
— Kirsty Dunlop
Almost Ghosts | 2020-2021
Re-Analogue | 2017-2020
"Our aim is simple - to make interesting things happen in the North-East of Scotland, 'to twist granite into gold'."
FOUNDING QUARTET Samm Anga / Matt Gibb / Alex Kither / Ian Macartney
NEW CROWN Tom Byam Shaw / Jared Cameron / Morven Kemp / Ian Macartney / Anita Markoff
FINAL CROWN Samm Anga / Jared Cameron / Matt Gibb / Morven Kemp / Ian Macartney / Anita Markoff / Miriam Schlüter
Alpha-Beta Series
-
{10/12/17: Phase A# Initiated (first meeting with Alex, Matt and Ian)}
- re.A//EVENT: A# - The Worst Night of The Year (performance night with Michael Pedersen, at Spin) (27/2/18)
- re.A//EVENT: B# - Monologue Night (main guest cancelled due to snow; with Creative Writing Society; at Blue Lamp) (2/3/18)
- re.A//EVENT: C# - Re-Analogue Presents Itself (art exhibition at Foodstory) (10/3/18)
- re.A//EVENT: D# - Ekphrasis (performance night with Kirsty Logan, at Spin) (30/3/18)
- re.A//EVENT: E# - Ducentium (flat party; Matt Flamenco’s 20th birthday, and reaching 200 Likes on Facebnook) (24/4/18)
- re.A//EVENT: F# - A Granite Afternoon (final Granite Dreaming show, on Aberdeen Student Radio) (25/4/18)
- re.A//EVENT: G# - Maymbrane (performance night, for May Festival, at Spin) (25/5/18)
- {Re-Analogue Awards 2018 (Twitter thread) + Re-Analogue Free-for-All (Facebook event)} (14/6/18)
- re.A//EVENT: H# - A Glade of Bishops (faith-themed performance night, at Queen’s Cross) (22/7/18)
-
{23/87/18: Phase B Initiated (logo and banner change)}
-
{Re-Analogue Mixtape released on Bandcamp, curated by Samm and Matt (25/8/18)}
- re.A//EVENT: I# - Life To The Fossil (Fresher’s performance night, at Spin) (11/9/18)
- {{Neu! Reekie! cameo – Mae Diansangu and Blythe Stockdale – September 16th, at Stonehaven Town Hall}}
- re.A//EVENT: J# - Liminal Space (Samm and Matt’s late-night event at their flat, with Jennifer Walton) (22/9/18)
- re.A//EVENT: K# - Seasonal Ascendance (Samm and Matt’s low-key open mic, at Spin) (27/11/18)
-
{17/12/18: Phase C Initiated (New Crown group-chat made)}
- re.A/EVENT: L# - We Are, Uh, Something New (flat-warming with performance night; reciting poetry from the kitchen sofa; “literary flat party”) (27/1/19)
- re.A/EVENT: M# - Last Chance To Be (Performance night/flat party hybrid; Tom’s leaving party) (29/3/19)
- re.A/EVENT: N# - Freedom From Speech (London show at the Poetry Cafe, Meanwhile launch) (19/4/19)
- re.A/EVENT: O# - Burn Your Professors (WORD Fringe/May Festival, at the Blue Lamp) (21/5/19)
- {27/5/19: Phase D Initiated (Final Crown group-chat made)}
-
re.A/EVENT: P# - MANIFESTO (Magazine launch at D2) (6/9/19)
- re.A/EVENT: Q# - Re-Turn (Fresher’s performance night with In The Works, at The Cellar) (12/9/19)
- re.A/EVENT: R# - poetry is the swing arm flappy dealy of words (flat party performance night hybrid) (18/9/19)
- re.A/EVENT: S# - Homage (open mic of other people’s work, at the Blue Lamp) (4/10/19)
- re.A/EVENT: T# - Re-Envision (film festival at the Blue Lamp, run by Anita and Jared) (13/11/19)
- re.A/EVENT: U# - am having a cone moment (“Re-A flat party Dux”) (4/12/19)
- re.A/EVENT: V# - The Departure (dual book event at Waterstones Aberdeen, with Vicki Jarret and Arthur Allen) (16/1/19)
- re.A/EVENT: W#, X#, Y#, Z# - Subliminal (Music festival organised by Samm and Matt; at Tunnels 2, Spin, D2 and Blue Lamp Upstairs) (30/1/20 - 2/2/20)
- re.A/EVENT: 0# - Re-Analogue Zero (planned grand finale at The Cellar; cancelled) (25/3/20)
-
re.A/GHOST: A#, B# - Performance (memorised poetic monologue, “tour” through Speakin’ Weird headline slot and English Lit. Soc. Performance Night) (9/1/19; 5/2/19)
- re.A/GHOST: C# – Softest Ludology (short story launch. Each reader fills out a labyrinth to get a copy of the short story "Re-Aberdeen", then draws a labyrinth for the next reader. Mazes as a form of currency – started at Bonobo Cafe with Tom, moved to Café Nero on Union Street) (13/2/19)
- re.A/GHOST: D# - Re:tracing (performance art walk, organised by Anita; going to places you went as a first date (graveyard, beach, King Street); intersection between geography and memory) (14/2/19)
- re.A/GHOST: E# - A.O.O.M. (Audio-Only Open Mic; special slot of the Re-Analogue radio show) (11/3/19)
- re.A/GHOST: F# - Re-Analogue Wake (planned flat party after Re-Analogue Zero, initially at 16 Jamaica Street, then 2e Frederick Street (Matt's place)) (25/3/20)
- de.A/GHOST: One# - De-Analogue (digital livestream finale on Twitch, featuring Michael Pedersen, Seán Hewitt, Rishi Dastidar and more) (23/5/20)
Anthologies
Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices, Broken Sleep Books
[as T.P.E.]
“I want my people to be okay”
Brilliant Vibrating Interface, SPAM Press
"Kelvinbridge to Shawlands, August 2023 (21st)"
glitchy pudding, SPAM Press
"circle emoji tree emoji"
Jump My Bones, Halfly Press
"Positions for the Ghost"
World-dreem, sincere corkscrew
"Foreword", "Trans-spatial".
Past Present Future, Forest Arts
"fear of wrists"
#UntitledThree, Polygon
"The Bookshop I Burned Down"
The Centenary Collection, Speculative Books
"Asciinaut &c."
Time and Tide, Arachne Press
"Mother Fish”, "Ovčice, Croatia”
Set in Granite, AUCWS
from "Stag of Scotland"
Northern Lights, AUCWS
"Hopscotching", "Darksong", "Long Shower", "Acquisition".
A Well-Travelled Notebook, WLW
“Time Zones”, “The Snails Move Out”, “Train to Waverley”
Linlithgow Writers’ 2011 Halloween Anthology
"Janus"
Magazines
Gilded Dirt [as 1846975493]
“Poem Written Through “Music Geek Track of the Week: Cuushe – Sort
of Light” by Matt Grosinger, 13/09/2013”
mariettemoor{DOT}co{DOT}uk
"Tentacular Wedding Rites"
catflap
"Yesterday, Forth Rail Bridge, December 2016 (15th)"
Ludd Gang
"Utah Teapot"
"nine ayes"
"Ladybird, Linlithgow Train Station, August 2022 (1st)"
Glasgow Review of Books
"The Bakery, The Kiln" (2023)
“Caledonian Cloud Computer II” (2023)
“Lighter in you” (2024)
PROTOTYPE
"Lerwick's Hyperballad",
"Infinite Swan"
The Poetry Review
"Hyperglasgow Queer Street to Superedinburgh Vaporwaverley"
These Accents
"from Nicholas Looks Down and Sees Light – Notes"
little living room
“August-colony"
Good Press' The Paper
"poems for the moments between literature, the fictions you cannot get undone on the afternoon commute"
"Linlithgow to Glasgow Queen Street, May 2022 (8th)”
GoldDust
"Embassies"
Weavers
"Two Husbands"
"If I Hear Clicking from a Spoken-Word Audience One More Fucking Time I'm Going to Scream, I'm Going to Lash My Tongue to a Stick and Throw Said Stick into the Ocean, I'm Going to Gyrate"
"Walking, Then, Sliding Across Ice"
FAIRY PIECE
"How to be a Writer"
Sledgehammer
"a bodiless alternative"
nine magazines
[various]
unpopular zine
"While Eating Pringles (or, World Message)”
“Future flat party” [as 1846975493]
spray
"Linlithgow, January 2021 (20th)"
"Becky with the good consideration"
"Hahahahahaha (Wtf)"
SPAM
from "Comment section"
Rodwell
"Charles Calgary Takes the Long Bus to Ballater"
Wonky Veg
[various]
RIC Journal
"The Phoenician Cinema"
Heavy Iridescent
"Laundry Laundry Laundry Laundry"
giallo
"What is this"
"I want it all Even if it's fake"
The Lumiere Review
"Acquisition II"
433
"00:37 - 00:56"
The Island Review
"Calgary Bay", "There Are No Islands"
Maudlin House
"Love You, Love You Sweetie"
Seiren
[various]
Ex/Post
“BEAUTIFUL MOTH CAPTURED IN GLASS THEN RELEASED!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Little Stone Journal
"For"
Tenebrae
"aye"
"aye"
"Perpendicularised"
Leopard Arts
[various]
Scoot Around
"Walking on Swings"
“Caledonian Cloud Computer”
Wild Court [as T.P.E.]
“Parable II”
“Go Queen”
Re-Analogue
"Foreword A",
"Foreword 1"
"The Infinite Fury".
The Attic
"Yellow Flowers"
Icarus
“Watering”
“Helen of Troy but with Eczema”
Grass
from "Thee Ozymandias Rex”
Meanwhile
“Moment, February 2018 (7th)” (2019)
“Logistics of Grandeur” (2019)
"Critique of Nihilism" (2022)
Suma Lima
"Peace Will Come"
[Untitled] Falkirk
"Citadel"
eMUSE
"The Land Where the Sun Bleeds"
Non-Fiction
Glasgow Review of Books
“The Universe is Not a Question: Objects in the Prose Poem”
Kinbote's Hemisphere Lyrics Zine
"Iridescence in the Labyrinth: On Kinbote's Hemisphere"
The Skinny
[various]
The Poetry Society
"Behind the Poem: On ‘Hyperglasgow Queer Street to Superedinburgh Vaporwaverley’"
SPAM Plaza
"Haunted by the Lattice: MidJourney, Mercer and Ashbery"
Scottish Magazine Network
“Strange fealties: the online literary magazine”
Young Poets Network
"How To Start Your Own Micropress"
University Times
[various]
Epikinetics
[various]
The Gaudie
[various]
MOIST
"Party on the Edge of a Donald Trump Victory"
"Stars, Spinning".
Audio
systems radio (Rice the Water, April 1st 2024)
from “The Fox and The Hiker”
Radio Buena Vida (gleaming aura, February 3rd 2024)
[various]
SPAM Press (URL Sonata)
[various]
AAJA Radio (You Mocked Me Once, December 24th, 2021)
"Train Derailed, Full of Flowers"
BBC Radio Scotland (The Afternoon Show with Janice Forsyth, May 13th, 2019)
"Shale Bings"
Aberdeen Student Radio (Granite Dreaming, Hipster Bubblegum, Re-Analogue, The Aberdeen Review, ASR Breakfast Show, 2017-2020)
[various]
Screenplay
Lone Star Tick | 2024
Thomas | 2023
Caledonian Dreams | 2022
Four Years | 2020
The Heart’s Constant | 2020
Rubix | 2016
Anhedonia | 2015
Decko | 2014
Stageplay
Year/Year | 2019
Digital
nine magazines (2022)
Kind🅱️s (2022)
@agameofknotsandcrosses (2021)
The Church of Transitory Signs (2021)
Tetra (2021)
MONTH OF MOONDAYS (2020)
XENOBOTANY (2020)
@QuasarEuripides (2020)
Achroma (2020)
Trade Product Engine (2020)
@EIBFdrone3010 (2019)
Epikinetics (2018-2019)
Trapped in the Nothing (2013-2014)
~800 works as @AyeAye12, @palladium-smoothie and @sea-ebony
Competitions
Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (2024), Poets & Players (2021), BBC Contains Strong Language (2019), Foyles Young Poets (2014-2016), Pushkin Prizes (2012), RSPB Wildverse (2011)
Workshops
“Post-Internet Pleasure as an Act of Poetics”, Edinburgh Futures Institute (online, April 5th 2023; with Kirsty Dunlop)
"Re: Remixed Reject-text: Queerness, Appropriation and Digital Poetics", Brilliant Vibrating Interface (Hillhead Library, January 17th 2023; with T. Person)
Installations
"The Kingfisher", Radipole Lake Visitor Centre (2012)
not words
videos
as Our Non-Hero
Canal (2018) | 2024
Garden / Park (2024) | 2023
Forest (2012) | 2023
Beach (2006) | 2021
as @e7519.6a0c85.088182
23.01.A_23.03.B | 2023
fear of wrists | 2020
as topaz-key
I WILL BUIILD A BREATHTAKING SQUARE OF DIRT | 2021
visuals
as Marvellous Language | [...]
as Russell Teapot | 2020-[...]
as The I | 2006–2014
band
I am one third of dance-punk band Texture Texture, with Santiago Taberna and Stewart Lawson.
Gigs
- The Doublet Upstairs [74 Park Road, G4 9JF], July 4th 2024 [with King Wine, Fuck This]
- Ushi’s Coffee Corner [182 West Regent Street, G2 4RU], November 3rd 2023 [with nil00, Slide Cancel]