Maximum Summer
by Sylee Gore

Published March 24, 2025 | Atelos | 978–1–945129–09–4 | $25.00 (out of print)

This book was launched in Brooklyn, London, and Berlin, with the generous support of Ely Watson of Unnameable Books; Dr Briony Hughes of Royal Holloway University; Erin Honeycutt, Simone Kyle, and Siddhartha Lokanandi of Hopscotch Reading Room, and Alexis Hyman Wolff of Lisbeth. Readings with Jed Munson, Claire Marie Stancek, and Mia You.

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.

Each book includes an original cyanotype handmade by the author.

“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

“‘Art is our archive, the only way to order and hold what’s vast or lost,’ Sylee Gore says in an interview with Thin Air Magazine. This idea feels central to Gore’s debut poetry pamphlet, Maximum Summer, which explores observation, memory and art through poetic fragments or ‘photographs’ of early motherhood. It is no wonder that Gore’s poetry concerns itself with ideas like this one; as an interdisciplinary artist, she often brings photography, visual art and film into conversation. Gore also works as a translator, and it is clear while reading Maximum Summer that translation across modes, genres and discourses … ” – read more at The London Magazine

“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

“The poems in Sylee Gore’s Maximum Summer, each placed in the middle of the page and framed by white space, record the passing of time in the months following the birth of the speaker’s first child. In a strong, lyrical voice, Gore delivers short, image-driven scenes that give an account of the speaker’s physical …” – read more at The Poetry Foundation

“Berlin-based Indian American poet, Sylee Gore, is interested in synthesis. Her work is an amalgamation of radically different traditions with an acute attention to form. This attention manifests in her translations, visual art, and poetry, the latter tracing its lineage to the Elizabethan and Metaphysical poets, canonical poets, who, in her words, are best known for their harmony, rationality …” – read more at Rusted Radishes

“Her poems show me how to find disparate threads of life and connect them, weave them into an image of ruin and birth. In etchings of the mundane, she reveals beauty. I am earthed …” – read more at Narya Rose Deckard’s With Wings

“‘A photograph is a sentence. Without / syntax.’ Beautiful writing in a beautiful hardbound edition of 200 copies.” – at Vertigo

“There is a mineral graininess to Gore’s poems that attempt to replicate analogue photography, particularly the chemical processes of light exposure. The sustained analogy between poetry and photography in Maximum Summer is interested less in hard-edged precision than in the gradual, light-sensitive processes of the cyanotype, tintype, and daguerreotype. Gore includes a handmade cyanotype in a carte-de-visite …” – read more at The New Cambridge Chapbook Review

“In Maximum Summer, her debut poetry chapbook, she uses the sestina to capture fragments, the early days in a child’s life, with the heightened sensibility we experience at times of birth and death – Dennis Potter’s ‘blossomest blossom’ – in exquisite six-line hits …” – read more at Tears in the Fence

Serafina Lee offered an introduction to the publishing work of Lyn Hejinian as context at the launch of Maximum Summer in Senate House on 1st April 2025, as part of Dr Briony Hughes’s Small Press Takeover series. It may be downloaded here [pdf].

Maximum Summer is out of print. Copies are available at the Bodleian Library, Oxford and at the libraries of University of California, Berkeley and University of Wisconsin-Madison.