UDP endeavors to create an experience of art free of expectation, coercion, and utility. 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
April 14 at 6:30 Central the TU English and Creative Writing Depart and OU's Mark Allen Everett Poetry Series will host Julie Patton and Lewis Freedman. Click below or use the QR code to register.
https://oklahoma.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrd-CsrTsuGdwhtns4ieJD_B3VfsZmSt9J
Join us virtually on April 17th at 6pm EST as we celebrate the launch of Second Factory's third issue! Hosted by the New Orleans Poetry Festival.
For further information: https://www.nolapoetry.com/index.php/node/679
To purchase a copy of Second Factory: Issue Three: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/second-factory-issue-three/
"The interview format is crucial to A Poetics of the Press. Letterpress publishing wasn’t and isn’t monolithic. Each press, each publisher and poet who engages, does so as a personal project, seeking to create art and play out the history of the book."
—Anette Lapointe on A Poetics of the Press, ed. Kyle Schlesinger, for New York Journal of Books.
Read the full review here: https://bit.ly/3wRY049
To purchase a copy of the book, visit: https://bit.ly/3wTAG2e
From now til April 18th, UDP's Second Factory journal is accepting submissions in the fields of Poetry, Prose, Nonfiction, and Visual Art!
Submit 10 pages max of material, plus a one-page cover letter which includes a brief paragraph about your work and a bio.
More info here: https://bit.ly/3DkV3dj
We look forward to reviewing your work :)
Katie Fowley, author of The Supposed Huntsman (UDP, 2021) is reading this Friday in Philly! Details are in the attached flyers.
Check out The Supposed Huntsman: https://bit.ly/3vL1HUR
It’s that “until now” the poem builds toward, transforming the words into a poem. Every verb represents a self-chosen and self-building act—the uncertainty and incoherence of the book’s beginning have been channeled through and transformed by the discipline of gaining literacies of the self, culture, and communication into 'a form of speaking that isn’t collapse, / a serpent’s language to save me / when I plummet.' "
-- Tom Bowden on Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk by Rocío Ágreda Piérola, tr. Jessica Sequeira (UDP, 2021)
To read the review: https://bit.ly/3N5ym1g
To purchase a copy of Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk: https://bit.ly/3D6LlLM
We're excited to be participating in SMOL Fair, a virtual fair launching today!
From now through March 26th, get a 25% discount on all books at uglyducklingpresse.org with code SMOLFAIR
Visit smolfair.com for a full list of participating presses, and events.smolfair.com for a calendar of readings throughout the week. Follow SMOL Fair on FB, Instagram (smolfair), and Twitter (fairsmol) for a chance to win give-aways, including bundles of UDP books!
"Air Raid is a study of human response to history; a light-catching collection that casts the minute and individual alongside the collective experience of survival and loss. It is a gift to have this polyphonic work of cultural legacy presented to English-speakers in such excellent translation."
—Marina Brown on Air Raid by Polina Barskova, tr. Valzhyna Mort (UDP, 2021) for The Los Angeles Review
Read the full review here: bit.ly/34Pr7t1
To pick up a copy of the book, visit: bit.ly/30bypVg
This Monday, March 21 at 8:00PM EST, join Sheila Maldonado and UDP poet Carina del Valle Schorske, for a live reading at The Poetry Project
For more info about the event, visit: bit.ly/3w9kbSU
"A lot of presses cater to poets on the margins, and a lot of poets are on the margins. Probably most. This interests me culturally because writers often get their start with small, independent presses like those in this collection, and of course that’s where all the romance and risk happens. For readers who haven’t had the opportunity to see the books discussed in A Poetics of the Press, I think they’re in for a real treat. It’s an alternative literary history."
-Kyle Schlesinger on "A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers" (UDP, 2021) for the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)
To read the interview: https://bit.ly/3COW4dr
To purchase "A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers": https://bit.ly/3wTAG2e
“Okay, how do I think about the rhythms of Berenguer’s writing in a way that I can bring my own musicality, my own ear into the translation, but not have that over-determine the work that she’s doing?”
—Urayoán Noel on translating Amanda Berenguer, in an interview with former UDP intern Noa Mendoza for Asymptote
To read the full interview, visit: https://bit.ly/3we3VzZ
To check out Materia Prima (UDP, 2019), click here: https://bit.ly/31SzgLA
New workshop with Holly Melgard!
Even though writers and publishers spend exorbitant time and money composing paratexts to guide readers to and through their work, standards in mainstream publishing strategically mask paratextual labor to appear invisible and unobtrusive to readers. Paratexts are things like blurbs, synopses, book covers, even separate author bios and interviews, all of which are peripheral dimensions of text that designate boundaries for its reception in discourse, as Gérard Genette theorizes in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987).
Paratextual Play studies the conventions of literary packaging by exploring paratexts as sites for creative expression, experimentation, self-authorization, and mischief-making. Participants will read works by Tan Lin, CAConrad, Kamau Brathwaite, Theresa Cha, Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, and Gertrude Stein, among others, utilizing the resource of our hivemind to process these invisible forms of frame-writing we commonly practice, but never call “the work.”
For more info & to register, visit: bit.ly/3I1rA8U
"The characters who appear in the poems, many of them Leningrad writers and cultural figures who suffered terribly during the siege, are also presented without numbing reverence: they are complex, fully rounded human beings with flaws, idiosyncrasies, and misdeeds [...]. The whole book’s tragic cast and refusal to idealize anyone (including the poetic speaker herself) can lead to weird details."
—Sibelan Forrester on Polina Barskova's Air Raid, tr. Valzhyna Mort, for World Literature Today
Read the full review here: https://bit.ly/3C8VfvO
To pick up a copy of the book, visit: https://bit.ly/30bypVg
"Jennifer Shyue renders Wong Kcomt’s poetry into seamless idiomatic English and provides a helpful afterward to further elucidate the poems."
—The Book Beat on Vice-royal-ties by Julia Wong Kcomt, tr. Jennifer Shyue
To read the full review, visit: bit.ly/3MvVpSO
To pick up a copy of Vice-royal-ties, click here: bit.ly/3lGJt4A
This Monday, March 7 at 8:00PM EST, join UDP poets Basie Allen and Stacy Szymaszek, as well as imogen xtian smith, for a live reading at The Poetry Project.
For more info about the event, visit: bit.ly/36KeArp
"They were in love because they had the very same fear
and the very same cruelty.
They took long walks in the old parts of town.
and they rehearsed one another’s future."
Three poems from UDP author Mariana Marin's "Paper Children" translated by Adam J. Sorkin are featured in The Calvert Journal
To read the featured poems in Calvert Journal:
https://bit.ly/34T00O1
To Purchase a copy of "Paper Children":
https://bit.ly/3v8z2wk
"Freedman brings us to a different economy lyric practice can devote itself to—the attempt, nearly eternal, of writing not the next poem, but the first one. It is a tautology worthy of him: the writing of the poem that alone makes possible the writing of the poem. A work one cannot begin and cannot finish—something like a self, a mind, a heart, a world."
—Dan Beachy-Quick on I Want Something Other Than Time by Lewis Freedman
To read the full review, visit: https://bit.ly/3JBkNEa
To pick up a copy of the book, click here: https://bit.ly/2YNczY7
Two new reviews of The Wayland Rudd Collection, ed. Yevgeniy Fiks, have come out from People's World and Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB).
“The combination of graphic imagery and contextualizing essays makes this book an excellent introduction to an earlier episode in the long struggle against anti-Black racism that is regrettably still not won.”
—Allison Blakely on "The Wayland Rudd Collection" for People's World
"The essays and images have equal importance, but the arrangement of the volume, with the art pieces beginning and ending the book, allows the collection itself has the last word."
—Sarah Valentine on "The Wayland Rudd Collection" for LA Review of Books
To read the reviews, visit:
https://bit.ly/3LEBksX & https://bit.ly/3696Rmq
Purchase a copy of The Wayland Rudd Collection here: https://bit.ly/3EyzCWf
"I don’t think I’m trying to answer any particular or persistent questions except the most basic ones that any human confronts: who am I, what am I, who are you, and why? Why is there suffering and what can I do about it? How am I going to deal with death? And so on. I don’t think of my writing as solving these or any other problems, much as I would be happy if it did. For the most part, I think, it’s unscripted, or unforetold—just part of the ongoing human story."
—Jean Day
To read the full interview, visit: bit.ly/3GUxyYI
To pick up a copy of Jean Day's Late Human, click here: bit.ly/3nbtV8F
"Broaddus is a master of the poetic line, boldly creating what I'd call harsh enjambments every which way- within Two Bolts, they don't seem dramatic at all."
-Livia Meneghin on "Two Bolts" By Matt Broaddus
To read the review:
https://bit.ly/352AWn3
To purchase "Two Bolts":
https://bit.ly/3Br7zqS
"In taking up a different framework – that of the artist’s book – this essay does not argue against Dog Ear as a work of poetry or, for that matter, photography. Instead, it attends to the relationships between word and image as they are reconfigured by the gesture of folding, which both repeats and crystalizes moments of exposure and concealment."
-Riley Hanick on Dog Ear by Erica Baum contrib. Beatrice Gross & Kenneth Goldsmith (UDP, 2016)
Link to the review:
https://bit.ly/3GD2htp
Link to Dog Ear:
https://bit.ly/34KTtUP
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