UDP Spring Studio Party: Macaisa Colgate, Nissan, Abramovich, Schluter, Ulmer, Rees

$ 5.00

UDP SPRING STUDIO PARTY

with readings by Rob Macaisa Colgate, Grace Nissan, Shira Abramovich, Kit Schluter, Spring Ulmer, Kaitlin Rees

Friday, May 2nd from 7–11pm

Ugly Duckling Presse
The Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street, #E303
Brooklyn, NY 11215

Celebrate six new titles with us at the UDP studio:

My Love Is Water by Rob Macaisa Colgate

At a house party with as many antipsychotics as party drugs, Danilo—bakla, schizophrenic, and heartbroken—is tracing the disintegration of a recent relationship. Dancing and stumbling with his Filipina nurse friends, Danilo traverses a Chicago apartment filled with gay ghosts and broken Tagalog.

The Utopians by Grace Nissan

Built around a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Utopians invents a new world, from the pieces of the old one, to formally explore the contradictions of liberation. A series of letters to Thomas More, and a poem called “THE WORLD” about Utopia’s vexed escape, encircle the remixed no-place as they elaborate Utopia’s double edge.

The Hand of the Hand by Laura Vazquez, translated by Shira Abramovich and Lénaïg Cariou, from Limited Connection Collective

The Hand of the Hand brings us to a future or an alternate universe in which earth, animal, and human intertwine—where stomachs have meadows, milk pours itself over trees, and flies wash the dead. By turns lyrical and absurd, this book explores the mystery and strangeness of what it means to be both speech and body, tongue and dirt.

Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation by bruno darío, translated by Kit Schluter

By the time of his death at twenty-nine, bruno darío had already left a surprising and indelible mark on Mexican poetry with Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation, a trilogy comprising the three full-length books he published in his lifetime. By turns sardonic and lyrical, scathing and irreverent, the hallucinatory sequence centers on the relationship of a young man (the Inconsolable) and an older woman who unexpectedly takes her own life (Lantana/Anfitriona).

Exercises 1950-1960 by Yannis Ritsos, translated by Spring Ulmer

Yannis Ritsos wrote Exercises 1950–1960 after being tortured and detained during the Greek Civil War. Incredibly, the poems are filled not with bitterness but with amazement—at a solitary leaf, a rope ladder, rose and grey light. Alongside such tenderness, of course, the nation state stretches out in the sun, teeth bared.

Don’t Hide the Madness by Nhã Thuyên, translated by Kaitlin Rees

In “Don’t Hide the Madness”, Vietnamese poet Nhã Thuyên takes seriously the question of how to keep speaking, how to endure in language when it has been and continues to be drained of meaning. Here the language of madness, like the language of dream, offers a possibility of going on.

Refreshments provided, but a bottle is always welcome!

Capacity is limited.