April 2008

 

**NEWS**

Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems has won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award.

From the PSA citation:
" The world was not ready when William Carlos Williams first published Kora in Hell in 1920 and the complete version of Spring & All three years later. Those books had a profound impact on American writing, even though they languished out of print for decades until they were brought back by City Lights in 1957 and Frontier Press in 1970. Aram Saroyan's minimal poems were even more of a scandal when they first appeared in the 1960s, foretelling not one, but several of the directions that American poetry would take in their wake, even as they too went out of print and stayed that way for over thirty years until Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn seized the opportunity to make them available again. Like all miniaturists, Aram Saroyan uses the poem as a giant magnifying glass on the language of our lives and the processes we use to understand this. A work like "Blod" - that's the entire text - calls up not merely the words blood and bod, but all the sexuality that truncated latter term conveys, refusing to settle on one side or the other. Reading Complete Minimal Poems, we are struck by just how sturdy these poems have proven to be and just how brightly Saroyan's sense of humor shines through these pages. These poems are works of great optimism, and are as radical and strong in 2008 as the day they were written."
—RON SILLIMAN

Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems is available directly from UDP. And it's $5 bucks off the cover price, with free shipping.

The awards ceremony takes place Monday, April 21st, at 7pm at the Grand Ballroom of the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, NYC. For more information go to the PSA site.

 

**NEW & FORTHCOMING RELEASES**

Book of Fears, a picture book by Ava Fedorov	Unbecoming Behavior by Kate Colby
East Slope by Su Shi translated by Jeffrey Yang	Enter Morris Imposternak... by Eugene Ostashevsky
A Different Practice by Fredrik Nyberg translated by Jennifer Hayashida	Fleeting Memories by Michael Ruby a FREE WEB BOOK
Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense by Christine Hume music by James Marks [coming in May]	One of a Kind by Jack Micheline [coming in May]

**AUTHOR NEWS**

Many UDP author readings are coming up; see the EVENTS page for details.

And for recent write-ups of UDP books and authors, see the PRESS page.

**SUBSCRIPTIONS**

You could count the number of remaining 2007-08 subscriptions on two hands. Get yours now by going to the SUBSCRIPTIONS page.

 

 

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