Ugly Duckling Presse

04/02/2021

CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE: Mónica de la Torre

TODAY — Friday, April 2, 3-4 pm (EST):

UDP author Mónica de la Torre will lead a virtual group reading-through of Cesar Vallejo's "###VI" from Trilce, tr. Clayton Eshelman, as part of The Flow Chart Foundation's Close Readings in a Virtual Space.

Register below:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/close-readings-in-a-virtual-space-monica-de-la-torre-tickets-138317773183?aff=erellivmlt

Read through Cesar Vallejo's "###VI" with poet Mónica de la Torre and others taking part.

04/01/2021

Ugly Duckling Presse: The Matrix Tote Bag

Today, we're announcing the debut of our The Matrix tote bag! This 100% cotton tote features an eye-catching excerpt from N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix. For an extra $10, you can also order The Matrix along with this tote!

To purchase, follow the link below.

04/01/2021

The April-May 2021 Segue Reading Series features UDP authors Simone White, Filip Marinovich, Katie Fowley, Asiya Wadud, and Galina Rymbu.

All readings will take place online via Zoom. Click here for dates and details: https://bit.ly/31EmSLW

04/01/2021

Ones and Zeroes by Quinn Latimer | Poetry Foundation

"Lucid and ludic both, Pritchard's voice is at once intimate and borrowed, studied and improvisational, strobed with the s**ttershot movements of personal consciousness, lyric pastoral traditions, and conceptual art materiality."

—review of N. H. Pritchard's The Matrix, Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine.

Visit our website to purchase a copy of the re-published The Matrix: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/the-matrix/

A new edition of N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix reintroduces one of the most conceptually rigorous texts of the Black radical tradition.

03/30/2021

Except for This Unseen Thread

"you don't have to enunciate
or understand the words
just keep praying
for us
with affection"

Except for This Unseen Thread playlist featured at Verse:

Ra’ad Abdulqadir (1953–2003) is a pioneer of the Iraqi prose poem, the author of five poetry collections, and a lifelong editor of Aqlam, Iraq’s leading literary magazine.

03/30/2021

ugly duckling presse - Submissions for Issue 3 of Second Factory

TOMORROW (March 31)—Submissions close for Issue 3 of UDP's journal, Second Factory!

We are accepting poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and visual art submissions via Submittable:

https://udp.submittable.com/submit/189109/submissions-for-issue-3-of-second-factory

03/29/2021

Having Been Born: Karla Kelsey Reviews Killing Plato and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard | Fence Digital | Critics 24/7

"[...] her text knots, flies, jostles, and fragments, resisting philosophy's tradition of taming chaos and smoothing edges. If philosophy might be idealized as a perfect glass sphere, The Semblable understands that sphere to have long ago shattered, finding more in the sharding than ever had been in that orb."

—review of Chantal Maillard's The Semblable, from UDP's 2020 Pamphlet Series, in Fence Digital.

Critics 24/7 | The Constant Critic | And so it might be the case that we can learn to forego this human-created secondary violence...

03/29/2021

Ugly Duckling Presse: UDP Notebook, 64 Pages (필 기 장)

Presenting the 2021 UDP notebook!

The text on the front reads "Notebook" in Korean, and the covers were printed letterpress in the UDP studio.

Proceeds from the sale of this notebook support the publication of poetry in translation. Click below to purchase.

03/29/2021

ugly duckling presse - Submissions for Issue 3 of Second Factory

Two days left until submissions close for Issue 3 of UDP's journal, Second Factory!

Send us your poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and visual art through Submittable by this Wednesday, March 31:

03/26/2021

On Monday, March 29, 5 pm, UDP translator Kristin Dykstra will be giving a talk on literary translation with a focus on Cuban writers Ángel Escobar (1957-1997) and Soleida Ríos (1950-).

Dykstra will incorporate readings from poems by each author, and UDP author Reina María Rodríguez will participate to read the poems in Spanish and offer follow-up comments from her own perspective; she will also be available for the Q&A.

This free virtual event is part of Emory Comparative Literature Department's Speaker Series x Reina María Rodríguez & Kristin Dykstra.

To learn more and register for this event, click below: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hints-of-a-collective-literary-translation-and-two-afro-cuban-writers-tickets-144256301481?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

03/25/2021

As part of Emory Comparative Literature Department's Speaker Series, UDP author Reina María Rodríguez and UDP translator Kristin Dykstra will lead two events this spring:

Monday, March 29, 5 PM (EDT)—"Hints of a Collective: Literary Translation & Two Afro-Cuban Writers"
Dykstra will lead a talk on literary translation with a focus on Cuban writers Ángel Escobar and Soleida Ríos. Rodríguez will participate to read the poems in Spanish and offer follow-up comments from her own perspective. There will be a Q&A. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hints-of-a-collective-literary-translation-and-two-afro-cuban-writers-tickets-144256301481?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

Friday, April 2, 5 PM (EDT): Rodríguez and Dykstra will read new work along with poems from The Winter Garden Photograph (UDP, 2019). The event will be in both Spanish and English. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bilingual-poetry-reading-with-reina-maria-rodriguez-kristin-dykstra-tickets-144277621249?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

03/25/2021

On Tuesday, March 30, 4 pm, UDP author Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves will be presenting work from The Florxal Review as part of the Environmental Feminisms series by Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies - GSWS at Penn, with Lucas de Lima and in conversation with Ricardo A. Bracho.

Register for the virtual event below:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/poetry-reading-with-lucas-de-lima-and-adjua-gargi-nzinga-greaves-tickets-136287197677

03/24/2021

Spring 2021 UDP Book Launch

Spring is here! With the changing season of course comes new books! UDP will be co-hosting a book launch for our Spring 2021 titles on Thursday, April 8 at 7:30 pm EST with Candice Madey gallery. This event will feature various UDP authors and translators along with a musical interlude.

To register, follow the link below.

Join us for the launch of UDP’s Spring 2021 books!

03/24/2021

THE MATRIX by N. H. Pritchard

The Matrix is now available to order!

The seventy-one poems of Pritchard’s debut might be regarded, as Charles Bernstein has written, as “sound” poems tethered not only to the literature of the early Umbra group and the Black Arts Movement but also to jazz culture and urban life in New York.

On The Matrix, Bernstein writes, “It is one of the most interesting works of its kind from this period of American poetry. Nielsen mentions the connection to s**t, a jazz vocalist’s style of intoning “vocables” (vocal sounds not immediately processed as words), while Thomas notes the connection with the “vocal styles and tones” of African languages. Pritchard hops, skips, and jumps with his syncopated words, creating spaces inside words in a way that makes one word many. It’s a rhythmic concatenation that relies on multiplicity and ambiguity.”

Order your copy here: bit.ly/2OH3XfU

03/24/2021

March 2021 Micro-Reviews - The Kenyon Review

"The Marathon Poet is a rousing, fast-paced book that vacillates from poetry to prose, never concerned with the speedometer’s numbers..."

— Paul Cunningham on Åke Hodell's The Marathon Poet, Trans. by Fia Backström for The Kenyon Review's Micro-Reviews.

Read below:

Interest in translation within the literary community is growing, and as a result, interest in Kenyon Review micro-reviews of poetry in translation is too. In 2021, we’ll be expanding from twice a year to four times. Look for us from now on in March, April, August, and September. Enjoy this latest...

03/24/2021

ugly duckling presse - Submissions for Issue 3 of Second Factory

One week until submissions close for Issue 3 of UDP's journal, Second Factory!

Second Factory is interested in receiving poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and visual art submissions.

Click below to send us your work through Submittable by March 31.

For Issues 1-2 of Second Factory, visit: http://bit.ly/secondfactory

03/23/2021

HCSHR 4:8 — Marshall Bood. Spring Cleaning.

"Often dark, Spring Cleaning is a journey into the recesses most people prefer to pass by."

— Dave Read reviews Spring Cleaning, by Marshall Bood via Haiku Canada's shohyōran, its supplemental book reviews column

Read the full review here:

HCSHR 4:8   —   Marshall Bood. Spring Cleaning . Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021. 31 pages. uglyducklingpresse.org reviewe...

03/23/2021

James Copeland on Marina Temkina’s What Do You Want?: “Dear Marina,”

"It seems so simple: the vulnerable admission, the wild directness. At times, it’s like a challenge. At other times, a collapse of all defenses."

— From the Vaults: James Copeland on Marina Temkina's What Do You Want?

Read the full piece below:

Ugly Duckling Presse is inviting artists and writers to respond to their favorite titles for our backlist blog series From the Vaults. Our…

03/22/2021

Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov & his Soviet Texts: A Bilingual Bacchanal

If you missed Globus Books' virtual event, "Dmitri Prigov & his Soviet Texts: A Bilingual Bacchanal," it is now available to view on their YouTube channel!

Click below:

#literature #poetry #RussianGlobus Books is honored to present the celebration of Dmitri Prigov’s literary work and particularly the recent publication of So...

03/22/2021

Letters from Latin America

"Her honest accounts of the fragility and daily obstacles faced by book artists and poets...make this essay a wonderful read."

on A Mano / By Hand, by Nicole Cecilia Delgado from The Morning Star.

The article also includes a review of God is a Bitch Too, by Maria Paz Guerrero. Read in full below:

Reviews of fiction by Argentinean Natalia Casali, poetry by Salvadoran-American Janel Pineda and Colombian Maria Paz Guerrero and an essay by Puerto Rican Nicole Cecilia Delgado

03/18/2021

ugly duckling presse - Submissions for Issue 3 of Second Factory

We are accepting submissions for Issue 3 of Second Factory, UDP's journal. Second Factory mostly publishes poetry, but we are interested in receiving creative nonfiction, fiction, and visual art submissions.

Click below to send us your work through Submittable by March 31.

For Issues 1-2 of Second Factory, visit: http://bit.ly/secondfactory

03/17/2021

Bilingual Poetry Reading with Reina María Rodríguez & Kristin Dykstra

Reina María Rodríguez will be reading new work along with poems from her book The Winter Garden Photograph (UDP, 2019) with translator Kristin Dykstra. This free virtual event hosted by Emory University will take place on April 2, at 5pm EDT.

To learn more about how to register for this event, follow the link below.

03/17/2021

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves

This Saturday, March 20, UDP author Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves' exhibition—a prologue to The Florxal Review—will open at Artists Space and run until May 1! The Florxal Review is described as "a spacious investigative work of postcolonial ethnobotanical literary criticism." Click below for more details.

Also check out Greaves' pamphlet, Of Forests and Of Farms: On Faculty and Failure, which was part of the UDP 2020 Pamphlet Series and is available here: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/of-forests-and-of-farms-on-faculty-and-failure/

Emerging on the Northern Hemisphere’s vernal equinox, the works comprising The x in florxal is silent when spoken center the marginalia and material traces of ongoing research inspired by language, machine aesthetics, documentation, systems analysis, radical education, investigative performance ar...

03/17/2021

Eecchhooeess—Norman H. Pritchard’s second and final book of poetry—has been reissued by DABA Press and is now available!

Originally published in 1971 by NYU Press, Eecchhooeess—much like Pritchard’s only other collection of poetry, The Matrix (UDP + Primary Information, 2021)—upends conventions of lexical cohesion and optical flow, treating language as a series of mirrors, doubles, stutters, and syncopations. DABA’s edition of Eecchhooees is unabridged and preserves much of the design of the original publication.

Order your copy of Eecchhooeess here: bit.ly/2OqIW9J

03/16/2021

Ulises Carrión's Sonnet(s)

"Sonnet(s) is a humorous visual-verbal language game, one that rewards continued looking."
—Megan N. Liberty

Ulises Carrión's Sonnets has been reviewed by Arts Books Editor Megan N. Liberty for The Brooklyn Rail.

To read the interview in full, follow the link below.

First published in 1972 as a typewritten staple-bound mimeograph book of 44 typographic versions of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti sonnet, the republication of this bookwork as a trade paperback with scholarly essays gives it a new afterlife. In it, the words themselves and their meaning become secondary....

03/16/2021

5th floor

Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève is hosting an online screening of James Hoff's (UDP) collaboration with DeForrest Brown Jr., *HOBO UFO (v. The New World)*. The artists utilize HOBO UFO and archival footage to navigate sites of historical and contemporary racial conflict in an indictment of the United States' simulation of democratic civility.

To learn more, follow the link below.

The 5th floor is the digital platform of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. This virtual space extends and completes the programming hosted on the Centre’s physical floors.

03/15/2021

Poetry — A Perfect Vacuum

The March 2021 issue of A Perfect Vacuum features UDP authors Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves and Yanko González!

The 3 poems by González (tr. Stephen Rosenshein) are from our forthcoming title, Upper Volta, which is now available for preorder here: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/upper-volta/

03/13/2021

Notions of Exile

We're honored to have selections from our Señal and Lost Literature series featured in the Notions of Exile library along with books from Kenning, Granary, and Cardboard House Presse. The Notions of Exile exhibition is curated by Fabiola R. Delgado, Leonardo Almao, and Faride Mereb.
To learn more, follow the link below.

03/12/2021

The Matrix is now available for order!

Of Pritchard’s formal experiments, Fred Moten writes, “When words and content get together, there’s enough room in the vast, infinitesimal blur not in between them for poetry to make its dispersive, displacing way. Norman H. Pritchard loves that non-Euclidean neighborhood. He keeps bullet time there, after hours, in a club, which is an open cell, called The Matrix. Welcome to this “huge/entering” of concrete breath—unprecedented, unsurpassed.” ⁠

Get your copy here: bit.ly/2OH3XfU

03/12/2021

Spring 2021 UDP Book Launch

Spring is here! With the changing season of course comes new books! UDP will be co-hosting a book launch for our Spring 2021 titles on Thursday, April 8 at 7:30 pm EST with Candice Madey gallery. This event will feature various UDP authors and translators along with a musical interlude.

To register, follow the link below.

Join us for the launch of UDP’s Spring 2021 books!

03/12/2021

Backlist Bulletin #9: Hair by Amy Narneeloop

"I found the way that Narneeloop navigates the reclamation of agency in the self particularly compelling. In a journey not unlike the acceptance of one’s own hair, this work illuminates a path to understanding the place we occupy in our bodies." —Bria Strothers

UDP Apprentice Bria Strothers muses on Amy Narneeloop's Hair for our Backlist Bulletin #9.

Diving into Amy Narneeloop’s Hair was a burrowing of my body into the page. The chapbook, a collection of poems entitled “Breasts,”…

03/10/2021

REVIEW: THE MATRIX – N.H. PRITCHARD (PRIMARY INFORMATION and UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE)

"Implicitly, reading The Matrix is an act of asking. What’s the reality of our meaning-making? What is its process? On an infinite loop of evolution and revolution, the collection invites us to explore such mysteries."
—Samantha Martin

Check out the rest of Martin's review of The Matrix for The Poetry Question by following the link below.
You can also order a copy of The Matrix here: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/the-matrix/

REVIEW: THE MATRIX – N.H. PRITCHARD (PRIMARY INFORMATION and UGLY DUCKLING PRESS) The collection is ultra-visual, a singing arrangement of offerings that has eyes of its own, old eyes that ga…

03/09/2021

5 books I read recently & loved: Mike Corrao Rituals Performed in the Absence on Ganymede, Ursula Andkjær Olsen Outgoing Vessel, Big Bruiser Dope Boy Something Gross, Susana Thénon Ova Completa, Rikki Ducornet Trafik – DC's

"god help us or god don’t help us
or god half help us
or he makes us believe that he’ll help us
and later sends word that he’s busy"
—Susana Thénon

How lovely to see Susana Thénon's Ova Completa featured on Dennis Cooper's blog! (And in such great company too!) To read the full blog post, follow the link below.

Matt Lee: Reading Ganymede, I often felt this sensation that the book had a will of its own, like I was handling an autonomous organism, as you mentioned. A few pages in, it immediately struck me as a sister to Gut Text, albeit more sinister than its older sibling. Your writing tends to fixate on th...