Tag: Ugly Duckling Presse
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“If I Had to Read It Again for the First Time, I Would”: Jacob Collins-Wilson Reviews Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed
Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed (translated by Jennifer Hayashida and including the full original Swedish version) is a short book of short poems that highlights imagery, nature, memories, and the strength of word-choice to create a cross-stitch of life during and after destruction. It is a book about growing up in war and…
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“Museum at the End of the World”: Stephen Scott Whitaker on Jennifer Nelson’s third poetry collection, Harm Eden
Jennifer Nelson’s third book, Harm Eden, is a warning. Composed largely in short free verse containers, Harm Eden’s exigency is collapse, state violence, wrapped in a culture that has become more and more disposable and absurd, a culture that contributes to systemic inequity, and perpetuates late-stage capitalism. Nelson gives us a representation of balkanized Western…
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“Buoyant Also”: Liana Jahan Imam on Aisha Sasha John’s TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED
Aisha Sasha John’s most recent chapbook begins with a short page that might double as scrolling titles at the start of a horror film: “In the fall of 2018, I left Toronto for Vancouver—the city where I spent the bulk of my childhood and in whose suburbs my parents still live.” On a separate line:…
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“Print Is Not Dead”: Peter Valente on A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers
A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers contains sixteen interviews Kyle Schlesinger did with publishers from the United States, England, Germany, and Australia. Most of the interviews were conducted in person and later transcribed, while the rest were done using the computer. The first of these interviews was with Steve Clay,…
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Story, Jennifer Firestone’s fifth book of poetry from Ugly Duckling Presse, reviewed by Dave Karp
One regular feature of contemporary writing instruction is the dictum that the writer should “tell her story,” bringing new and needed narratives to light and challenging old, entrenched ones explicitly or implicitly. Jennifer Firestone’s Story meets this challenge in a different way. The poem resists not so much dominant narratives as narrative itself; it is…
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“Listening to the Reverberating Voices in Algaravias: Echo Chamber by Waly Salomão”: A Poetry in Translation Review by Jayme Russell
“I swim in the great open book of the world.” —Waly Salomão In Algaravias: Echo Chamber, Waly Salomão’s writing contains a multitude of references, or echoes, other writers, languages, and stories from around the world. He includes modern voices like Wallace Stevens and Paul Celan, but running throughout the book is an underlying retelling…
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“Back in the USSR”: Leonard Kress Reviews Bill Berkson’s Russian Notebook Invisible Oligarchs
Bill Berkson, who died in June 2016, was one of the last survivors of the original New York School that included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler, poets who seemed equally at home in the world of art, or at least the New York art scene. The headline of his New York Times obituary…
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Staying Alive, poetry by Laura Sims, reviewed by Jackson Nieuwland
As soon as I read the description of this book on the Ugly Duckling Presse website, I knew I had to have it: In her fourth poetry collection, Staying Alive, Laura Sims envisions the state of the world and of human existence before, during, and after the forever-imminent apocalypse. In channeling and sampling works of apocalyptic…
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The Final Frontier: FANTASY, by Ben Fama
Opening the envelope that contained Ben Fama’s Fantasy was an exhilarating experience. It had been raining for several days when I noticed the wet package stuck to the bottom of my mailbox. While many books have succumbed to a fate of shriveled pages, warped and discolored covers in this way, Fantasy came out of its…
Heavy Feather Review 