nonprofit publisher of experimental poetry, translation, performance, and the absurd // keeping poetry ugly for over 20 years 🦢
Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit art & publishing collective producing editions of new poetry, translations, lost works, and artist's books. The Presse favors emerging, international, and "forgotten" writers with well-defined formal or conceptual projects that are difficult to place at other presses. Its full-length books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, magazine and newspaper all contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.
Operating as usual
NYC — join us for the launch of our new book ‘adjacent islands / islas adyacentes’ by Nicole Cecilia Delgado (translated by Urayoán Noel) at the Clemente Center in the Lower East Side. This is a in-person event.
Readings by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Urayoán Noel, Mara Pastor, and Edwin Torres.
This event is co-sponsored by Poets & Writers, Doublecross Press and La Impresora.
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Crisis Inquiry by Tony Iantosca
“Crisis Inquiry is a collection of poems in three parts that unsettles the lyric poem from within its constraints in ways that are both sardonic and searching. These poems probe the corners of a crisis of inquiry both intimate and general, inquiring into the registers, rhetorics, and scales of the various ongoing crises we live through daily. Iantosca’s third full-length collection of poetry, Crisis Inquiry stages satire and candor as alternating strides of the same figure, walking to and fro between you and me.”
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🚨LAST CHANCE 🚨 to sign up for Willa Goettling's Dec. 4th hardcover coptic stitch workshop in our-studio. Sliding scale available + more details below! Come make journals with us 🧵🪡📖
HARDCOVER COPTIC STITCH JOURNALS with Willa Goettling An in-person workshop at the UDP Studio. Sunday, December 4th11AM — 5PM In this 6-hour workshop participants will learn how to make hardbound journals using the intermediate hand-binding method: coptic stitch. Each participant will leave with t...
for , why not donate to keep your favorite esoteric small press alive?🦢
UDP is a frugal organization that has blossomed through fervent and utopian belief in the potential of volunteer effort. We cut our corners and stretch our dollars, so whatever you give will go a long way. A donation of $400 procures foreign language rights for a book in translation; $800 funds an a...
Our studio stands on the unceded lands and waters of the Munsee Lenape and Canarsie people. As another Day of Mourning is upon us, we remember that we are working, writing, and reading on Native Land. In collaboration with BPL Presents, UDP printed ‘Lenapehoking: An Anthology’ for the Lenape Center. The book features historical essays, interviews, poems and paintings by leading Lenape and other Indigenous scholars, writers, poets, linguists, composers and artists. The anthology celebrates ‘Lenapehoking’, the first Lenape-curated exhibition of Lenape historic and contemporary Lenape cultural arts in NYC. We are proud to amplify Indigenous voices however we can, today and every day.
Image 1: Cover of ‘Lenapehoking: An Anthology’, edited by Joe Baker, Hadrien Coumans, and Joel Whitney and printed at UDP.
Image 2: An excerpt from an essay by Curtis Zunigha, co-founder and co-director of The Lenape Center.
Image 3: Detail from ‘The Protectors’ (2021)
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Rest In Peace, Bernadette Mayer. Alongside Vito Acconci, she edited underground mimeographed magazine ‘0 TO 9’ from 1967-1969. They brought together the work of Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, Yvonne Rainer, Hannah Weiner, and many other experimental writers. UDP collected the issues and published them together in 2006 as the second publication in our Lost Literature series. We are humbled to have played any part in putting out her work. There will not be another like her.
Image 1: Bernadette Mayer ca. 1966, by Bill Berkson.
Image 2: The cover of ‘0 TO 9: THE COMPLETE MAGAZINE’, published by UDP in 2006.
Image 3: A poem by Mayer from ‘0 TO 9’.
Image 4: From the UDP archive, the Special Edition facsimile reprint of ‘0 to 9’, now out of print.
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Bookmaker extraordinnaire Willa Goettling ( ) is coming to our studio on December 4th for an all-day workshop teaching the art of the hardcover coptic stitch. Come make journals with us 🧵🪡📖
[Image: Willa Goettling teaches students to make paper at - photo credits to Dieu Donné)
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IN-PERSON Workshop at the UDP Studio in Gowanus
Sunday, December 4th
11AM — 5PM
In this 6-hour workshop participants will learn how to make hardbound journals using the intermediate hand-binding method: coptic stitch. Each participant will leave with their own 152-page journal. The class will cover useful tools & resources for making hardbound books, how to sew multi-signature books using coptic stitch, and how to use book cloth and book board to create durable and aesthetically pleasing covers. Though this is an intermediate bookmaking method, all skill-levels are welcome. All materials for the class are provided.
* This is an in-person workshop
* Enrollment limit is 8 participants on a first-come, first-served basis
* Sliding scale pricing is available ($150 - $250). Please write to [email protected] for more info.
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Willa Goettling is an artist and educator interested in art as a tool for information sharing and community building. Her own art practice is largely based around the production and distribution of printed matter. Willa received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book & Paper from Columbia College Chicago (2019). While at Columbia, she was a Print Production Fellow and contributing writer for the Journal of Artists’ Books; taught undergraduate and graduate printmaking workshops; and received an Albert P Weisman Award for her MFA thesis. In 2020 she was an Artist in Residence at Eureka! House via the Center for Artistic Activism (Kingston, NY). She has taught workshops at Parsons, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Interference Archive among other spaces around the country. She currently serves as the Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery (Brooklyn, NY).
RIP to Kent Johnson, who did so much work with us, from translating Uruguayan avant-garde poet Amanda Berenguer alongside Kristin Dykstra to his extraordinary translation pamphlet of Cesar Vallejo’s only known interview. ✊🏽🦢
after falling prey to a phishing scam, we have decided to start a new Instagram page — the handle is the same as this one and on our Twitter. although we love a little anarchy and subversion, this has been quite hard on a small presse post-pandemic.
please share widely and follow our new account…we’re only as big as our community 🦢
a prescient fragment on this blood moon eclipse / election day — 'Plate XV, Ribbon' from Erica Baum's 'Dog Ear' (2016)
a note about our Instagram — please share widely.
if anybody can help us get our account back, please DM us on Twitter [at]uglyducklingfprs or write us via email to er[at]uglyducklingpresse[dot]org
Did you make a performance work in 2021, of any kind, anywhere, that you want to document in print?
Submissions are open for Emergency Index Vol. 10, an annual compendium of weird, wild, wonderful performance documents from all over the world!
Check out the guidelines and submission portal on https://emergencyindex.com/submit-your-performance (and browse the site to see our juicy archives!)
The deadline to submit to Vol. 10 is -- what else? -- October 10th!
Please share!
Join Luu Dieu Van & Special Guests on Zoom for an open conversation about poetry and her newest release She, Self-Winding, from Ugly Duckling Presse.
Register to attend here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/she-self-winding-by-luu-dieu-van-virtual-book-launch-tickets-394060474487
Printed Matter /St Marks is excited to host the launch of artist Tammy Nguyen’s new book, O, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, on the rooftop of 38 St Marks Pl.
Tammy will be reading from O accompanied by ensemble Sonic Mud, who will make music using handmade ceramic instruments. Following the reading we’ll have a reception with a DJ set by Emmy Catedral and Vietnamese snacks!
Capacity is limited, arrive early!
https://www.printedmatter.org/programs/events/1458
On Saturday, September 10, Chia-Lun Chang will be teaching workshops on fiction and poetry at Prospect Park's Boathouse via the Brooklyn Public Library's University Open Air.
More info and rsvp here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/university-open-air-virtual-20220910-0
and here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/university-open-air-virtual-20220910-1
In this class, students will read original and translated poems by contemporary Taiwanese authors. Pairing individual poems with American poets, students will use thematic concepts as a guide to generate new work; elements include intimacy, magic, suppression, sarcasm, lost in translation, and more,...
"Never Again", an excerpt from Carlos Soto-Román's 11, forthcoming in English translation from UDP, is now up in World Literature Today.
The title of Carlos Soto-Román’s 11 isn’t just a number—it’s a date. On September 11, 1973, Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, ushering in a seventeen-year dictatorship that completely upended the country’s political and social system. Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews, and media files, 11 immerses readers in the state-sponsored terror during this period as well as the dilemmas of documenting human rights violations and ensuring they are never repeated. The poetry here adopts the form of collage, erasure, and appropriation, the language emerging from censorship and suffocation as experienced under military rule. Soto-Román’s work asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken and unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory.
—Thomas Rothe
Read the excerpt here: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2022/september/never-again-excerpt-11-carlos-soto-roman
“My dear young people: / The future of Chile is always in you, whose glory we are / now sculpting,” from “Never Again,” An Excerpt from 11, by Carlos Soto-Román
Catch UDP authors Natalee Cruz, Jed Munson, and Benjamin Krusling at the The New York City Poetry Festival -- Saturday, Sept. 10 at 4:30pm at The Brinkley on Governors Island
full schedule and festival info here: https://www.newyorkcitypoetryfestival.com/readings
Señal is accepting submissions!
Señal is a chapbook series for contemporary Latin American poetry (by living authors) in translation. Our series purposely works against narrow definitions of either “poetry” or "translation" or “Latin America.” We are open to an expansive range of work that has some connection to “poetry,” “translation” and “Latin America,” as understood in the broadest of terms. We are excited to see what you are working on.
https://udp.submittable.com/submit/233179/senal-translation-submissions-august-15september-15-2022
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Señal tiene convocatoria abierta ahora!
Señal es una serie de plaquettes de poesía latinoamericana contemporánea (de escritores vives) en traducción. Nuestra serie trabaja expresamente en contra de las definiciones limitadas de lo que es la “poesía” o la “traducción” o “Latinoamérica”. Nos interesa una amplia gama de trabajos que tengan alguna conexión con la “poesía”, la “traducción” y “Latinoamérica”, en el sentido más amplio de esos términos. Nos entusiasma mucho la posibilidad de ver en qué estás trabajando.
https://udp.submittable.com/submit/233179/senal-translation-submissions-august-15september-15-2022
As part of their 2022-2023 season, The Poetry Project has announced a fellowship opportunity that is part of their commitment “to building and fostering creative community…”
The Emerge–Surface–Be fellowship offers five emerging writers the opportunity to be paired with a mentor and receive one-on-one mentorship, as well as publication and performance opportunities. Each Fellow receives an award of $2,500. Submit your application by August 28th here: https://www.poetryproject.org/fellowships/emerge-surface-be
Don't let these last dog days pass you by without cashing in on our summer Hot Books Sale!
Through tomorrow August 21st, all backlist titles will be 40% off in the UDP online store. Use the discount code "HOTBOOKS" at checkout!
https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/
See you at the Brooklyn Public Library on August 20th from 10am-4pm for the 2022 Small Press Flea!
This year's SPF promises to provide your end-of-summer beach reads, sweet deals, and cold treats while you fill your totes. And we have a couple of perfect summertime partners for this year's fair: The Social will be on-site to offer ice cream (while supplies last), and BOMB will be cutting up some watermelon at our booth! Plus, poet and artist Hannah Eve Rothbard will present her "Air my Dirty Laundry" installation, a collection of hand-dyed garments embroidered with lines of poetry.
Rain or shine, unless it’s pouring. We'll see you there.
Participating publishers:
3 Hole Press, 53rd State Press, A Public Space, The Baffler, Belladonna*, Birds, LLC, Black Sun Lit / Vestiges, BOMB, Common Notions, Dancing Foxes, DoubleCross Press, Hanging Loose, House of SpeakEasy, Inpatient Press, Irrelevant Press, McPherson & Company, n+1, Nightboat, OR Books, Pioneer Works, Poets & Traitors Press, Radix Media, Restless Books, Secret Riso Club, Seven Stories Press, Small Editions, Song Cave, The Quarterless Review, Ugly Duckling Presse, Verso Books, Wave Books, Wendy’s Subway, Wonder, Zone Books
https://bombmagazine.org/events/2022-small-press-flea/
Sponsored by The Social and Brooklyn Public Library
UDP is currently accepting applications for the job of Publicity and Marketing Manager!
Go here for details and to apply: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/about/opportunities/
Ugly Duckling Presse—a nonprofit publisher of poetry, translation, essay, performance, and art—is seeking to hire a part-time Publicity and Marketing Manager to manage promotional operations at the UDP studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The deadline to apply is midnight EST on August 22nd, with an ide...
"No clear line demarcates where Vicuña's poetry ends and her visual art or performance practice begins. … Reading her poems helps viewers better apprehend the poetry in her visual practice, and seeing her artworks helps readers better appreciate the spaces she constructs in her poems. As a visual artist, Vicuña remains always a poet who at times transgresses language, legibility, and history. At the edge of writing, there is a knot."
— John Vincler on "Spin Spin Triangulene", a retrospective of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña on view at the Guggenheim until September 5th
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158316/knot-writing
The poetry of Cecilia Vicuña's soft sculptures.
Join us for a night of poetry at Yu & Me Books! with readers Terrence Arjoon, Sylee Gore, Tawanda Mulalu, Jed Munson, and Jade Yeung
Thursday, August 11, 2022
6:00 PM 8:00 PM
Yu and Me Books
44 Mulberry Street New York, NY, 10013
https://www.yuandmebooks.com/events/summer-poetry-night
Join us for our spicy summer poetry night! No Registration Required!
Translator Jennifer Shyue has retained superbly the Spanish nuances in English to keep alive this fascinating lyrical voice from Peru.
Wong KComt, born into a T***n (Chinese-Peruvian) family in the north-eastern coastal Chepen, explores borders, ethnic diversity and religion: “Papa [daddy] told me to detest the Japanese / like everyone says to hate Chileans./ … In the Atacama Christ sifts / through red grape seeds./ Peru dies, Wata, and all I remember is what you said about my aunt:/ ‘She was hot, your aunt Carmen,/ she didn’t look Chinese.’/ I smiled unoffended, because in Peru nobody / looks like anything.”
— Leo Boix reviews Julia Wong Kcomt’s Vice-royal-ties (tr. Jennifer Shyue) in Morning Star
Read the whole review here: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/letters-from-latin-america-july-21-2022
New titles from across the continent: fiction by Mexican Juan Pablo Villalobos and Peruvian Katya Adaui and poetry collections by Chilean Veronica Zondek, Peruvian Julia Wong Kcomt and Mexican Adriana Diaz Enciso
"Pyambu/Dream Pattering Soles successfully merges the personal with the communal, using a language that is as powerful as it is political: 'The poor sleep / where the sierras cave in, /the poor sleep. / Under the pindo*, a dog / and the poor person sleep.'”
— Leo Boix reviews Miguelángel Meza’s Dream Pattering Soles (tr. Elisa Taber) in Morning Star
Read the whole review here: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/leo-boix-letters-latin-america-july
Reviews of Never Did the Fire by Chilean Diamela Eltit, Catching Fire by Daniel Hahn and Pyambu/Dream Pattering Soles by Miguelangel Meza
"And in Notes Toward a Pamphlet, a world of endless digressions is the real discovery, a space where unknown perceptions and experiences can take place. This understanding of the alveolar, the digressive and the non-linear, I believe, is not separate from the cultural history and space that Chejfec came from, one where perhaps the fixity of the linear and its hierarchies have created unending anguish."
— Sharmistha Mohanty on Sergio Chejfec's Notes Toward a Pamphlet (tr. Whitney DeVos) in Asymptote.
Read the whole review here: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/criticism/sergio-chejfec-notes-toward-a-pamphlet/
Writing about the work of Sergio Chejfec is like trying to drive a nail into the mist. Anything Chejfec creates is—paradoxically—almost impossible to describe in words. He was the author of some remarkable works of fiction that include The Dark, The Planets and
Tammy Nguyen on Books as Art Objects in the Literary Hub: https://lithub.com/tammy-nguyen-art-books/
In my books, the spine is a simple, efficient, elegant, and functional form that can conduct and generate meaning, and as readers, we imbue meaning into materials based on the way they are presente…
It's not too late to subscribe to Ugly Duckling Presse for 2022!
The year has been slow to get going, and we recently mailed out the first of 2022's four subscription packages, but if you subscribe now we'll send you this and the next three quarterly installments of UDP's publications!
This installment includes Basie Allen's Palm-Lined with Potience, Natalee Cruz's I Have Seen the Bluest Blue, Iman Mohammed's Behind the Tree Backs (tr. Jennifer Hayashida), Lewis Warsh's Elixir, and the third issue of Second Factory.
We offer several different kinds of year-long subscriptions on a rolling basis. Become a subscriber at any time, paying either monthly or annually for the Full Presse subscription to receive the next twelve month’s worth of titles (20+ books and chapbooks, plus prints and ephemera and other goodie...
July 23 from 10am to 5pm -- Join UDP and dozens of other excellent exhibitors at Women's Studio Workshop's ( ) Upstate Art Book Fair, part of UPSTATE ART WEEKEND Upstate Art Weekend
July 23, 2022
10AM - 5PM
722 Binnewater Lane
Kingston, NY
https://bit.ly/UpstateABFair
Women’s Studio Workshop is thrilled to announce the first annual Upstate Art Book Fair scheduled to take place on Saturday July 23rd, 2022 as part of UPSTATE ART WEEKEND.
Sommer Browning and Liliana Porter Interviewed by Alexis Almeida, now up on BOMB Magazine's website here: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/a-conversation-between-sommer-browning-and-liliana-porter/
A conversation about the links between art-making, poetry, translation, and more.
UDP is currently seeking applications for the job of Presse Manager to lead general operations at the UDP studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The deadline to apply is midnight EST on July 18th, with an ideal start date in August 2022. For more information and to apply, visit: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/about/opportunities/
This position is central to UDP operations and to fulfilling its mission. The Presse Manager oversees all the operational work done by UDP staff members, apprentices, and volunteers. They are a key figure in the daily life of the Presse, coordinating yearly timelines and strategies for budgeting and development, and serving as a liaison to UDP’s Editorial Collective and Board. The person holding this position will manage the flows of collective work at the UDP Studio, steward its financial resources, and lead the enactment of the publishing program envisioned by the Editorial Collective. UDP is committed to collective governance and collaborative structures, so an ideal candidate would have demonstrated openness toward collaborative working environments.
Ugly Duckling Presse—a nonprofit publisher of poetry, translation, essay, performance, and art—is seeking to hire a full-time Presse Manager to lead general operations at the UDP studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The deadline to apply is midnight EST on July 18th, with an ideal start date in August 2...
Come join us at Molasses Books on July 1st at 8PM for July's edition of Another Way to Say, with readings of prose and poetry translated by Elisa Taber, Marine Cornuet, and Lin King!
Come see us at Printed Matter / St Marks x 8-Ball Community’s East Village Zine Fair, this Saturday, June 18, 11am - 6pm, on St Marks Pl between 1st and 2nd Avenues.
A full schedule of programming will be held throughout the day, including workshops and performances at neighborhood community gardens and a rooftop poetry reading at 38 St Marks Pl.
Check the stellar list of Exhibitors in the image. More details here: https://www.printedmatter.org/east-village-zine-fair
UDP will be featured in the return of Printed Matter / St Marks x 8-Ball Community’s East Village Zine Fair, scheduled to take place Saturday, June 18, 11am - 6pm, on St Marks Pl between 1st and 2nd Avenues. Like last year, a full schedule of programming will be held throughout the day, including workshops and performances at neighborhood community gardens and a rooftop poetry reading at 38 St Marks Pl.
"Often books of poetry and interviews with poets position the poet as a monolith, whose accomplishments speak for themselves, whose processes are vague and whose growth is assumed. In A Poetics of the Press, the opportunity to learn more about the “before, during, and after” within the poet’s journey is refreshing and invigorating."
—Greg Bem on A Poetics of the Press
Read the full review, here: bit.ly/3zs3MdU
To pick up a copy of the book, visit: bit.ly/3wTAG2e
"As for form: yes, those nods to formalisms are intended. And form, however you define it, serves the same function for me as the long poem does to my thought process: I like containers. “Recalibration,” is apt too; to the degree that form is “mechanical,” it’s iterative, and that lends it the potential for variation — for optimism (growth) and the mistake in nature."
-Jean Day, author of Late Human (UDP,2021) with Small Press Traffic
UDP author Jean Day was interviewed by Small Press Traffic.
To read the article in full: https://bit.ly/3LRHHYK
To purchase a copy of Late Human: https://bit.ly/3nbtV8F
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