Books published by Ugly Duckling Presse

Translated by Elisa Taber. In DREAM PATTERING SOLES a voice mournfully asserts "I appear" and the world begins. Miguelángel Meza's words are signifiers without hierarchy within the lyric structure that reference the cosmological Mbyá Guaraní narratives. Thus, the origin of earth is traced to the utterance of the first ñe'ë, or word-soul. Meza's authorial style and references to a millenary Amerindian culture jointly point to another way of conceiving the world. The counterintuitive way that he renders the individual out of the communal is reminiscent of the Paraguayan embroidery technique, ñandutí, which means spider's web. Threads extracted from, rather than woven into, a fabric trace a geometric pattern. He imitates this practice by claiming authorship through his lyric synthesis of a communal narrative. The poet seems to say through those that came before him: identity lies in erasure, not mark-making.Poetry.

BEHIND THE TREE BACKS investigates a poetics of remembrance, excavating war and displacement through a constellation of animate memories carved out of deep pleasure as well as brutality, the ancient and the institutional, the everyday and the geopolitical.Translated by Jennifer Hayashida. BEHIND THE TREE BACKS investigates a poetics of remembrance through senses that hover just below and just above the skin. The text excavates war and displacement through a constellation of animate memories carved out of deep pleasure as well as brutality, the ancient and the institutional, the everyday and the geopolitical. The book insists on a poetics that recall through vibrating auratic fields, violence, love, and sexuality; these sensations tremble and cohere in a musical and tightly composed lyric.Poetry.

Poetry. In FORGET THEE, Dreiblatt's first full-length book of poetry, an anonymous narrator ruminates on the end of the world, while conversing with various historic and literary figures from the ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian worlds. Going behind writing to start language afresh, they observe together how often worlds end; how language is the register in time of our answerability to each other; how writing, sociality, play, violence, and transcendence flow together into the vexed semi-coherence we have come to call culture.

Poetry. LATE HUMAN is a collection of tragi-comic poems on lateness, belatedness, Weltschmerz, and borrowing (with a nod to Ernest Mandel's 1975 tome on the twilight of capitalism). The human of the title is multiple, personal, and drenched in the tears of the 21st century. Cracked children's rhymes lead onto an ethnography that takes Helen Mirren's first film appearance as seriously as Moby Dick. At the volume's center, three laments honor the "realism / that would send anyone to spasm," a sentiment that crests in the book's title poem before alighting, provisionally, in "Early Bird"--its dawn chorus.